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AUTHOR OF “ FHAi^4::OM FORI^^ip,” 
AUDLKT'S SECRET,” &c., 


LADY 


tho .y* ^•» ^ Bccond-clasg 




«» Vol. 6, No. m.'Qct. SI, 18SS. Annual Subscription, *60.00. 


UNDER THE 

RED FLAG 


Miss M. E. BRADJB^6 n, 


N 


+ To 1\N • W • 1^ OVE L L • CoAVPANY 

u/ ^ » -T4,t>lg V^iETATR’' 





I LOVELL’S LIBRARY:-CATAL06UE. 


1. Hyperion, by H. W. Lon^ellow. .20 
ft. Outre-Mer, by H. W. Longfellow. 20 

5. The Happy Boy, by BjOrnson 10 

4. Arne, by BjOrneon 10 

6. Frankenstein, by Mrs. Shelley... 10 

6. The Last of the Mohicans ..20 

7. Clytie, by Joseph Hatton 20 

8. The Moonstone, by Collins, P’t 1. 10 

9. The Moonstone, by Collins, P’t II . 10 

10. Oliver Twist, by Charles Dickens. 20 

11. The Coming Eace, by Lytton....lO 

12. Leila, by LordLytton 10 

13. The Three Spaniards, by Walker. 20 

14. TheTricksofthe GreekstJnveiled.20 

15. L’Abb^ Constantin, by Halevy..20 

16. Freckles, by K. F. Eedcliff . . ..20 

17. The Dark Colleen, by Harriett Jay.20 

18. They Were Married 1 by Walter 

f Besant and James Kice 10 

19. Seekers after God, by Farrar 20 

20. The Spanish Nun. by DeQuincey.lO 

21. The Green Mountain Boys 20 

22. Fleurette, by Eugene Scribe 20 

23. Second Thoughts, by Broughton. 20 

24. The New Magdalen, by Collins.. 20 

25. Divorce, by Margaret Lee 20 

26. Life of Washington, by Henley. .20 

27. Social Etiquette, by Mrs. Saville.l5 

28. Single Heart and Double Face,. 10 

29. Irene, by Carl Detlef 20 

30. Vice Versa, by F. Anstey .... 20 

31. Ernest Mai travers, by Lord Lytton20 

32. The Haunted House and Calderon 

^ the Cotirtier, by Lord Lvtton. . 10 

53. John Halifax, by Miss Mulock. ..20 

34. 800 Leagues on the Amazon 10 

35. The Cryptogram, by Jules Verne.lO 

36. Life of Marion, by Horry 20 

37. Paul and Virginia 10 

38. Tale of Two^Cittes, by Dickens.. 2) 

39. The Hermit 8 ^^b 3 s Kingsley 20 

40. An AdverWre:^^! Thule, and Mar- 

riage of Moira Fergus, Black . 10 

41. A Marriage in High Life 20 

42. Robin, by Mrs. Parr 20 

43. Two on a Tower, byThos. Hardy.20 

44. Rasselas, by Samuel Johnson..., 10 

45. Alice; or, the Mysteries, being 

Part II. of Ernest Maltravers. .20 

46. Duke of Kandos, by A. Mathey...20 

47. Baron Munchausen .'.10 

48. A Princess of Thule, by Black.. 20 

49. The Secret Despatch, by Grant, 20 

50. Early Days of Christianity, by 

Canon Farrar, D D., Part I 20 

Early Days of Christianity ,Pt. 11.20 
61. Vicar of Wakefield, by Goh smith. 10 
52. Progress and Poverty, by Henry 
George 20 

68. The Spy, . by Cooper. 20 

54. East Lynne, by Mrs. I food... 20 

65. A Strange Story, W Lord 1 ytton.. .20 
6& Adam Bede, by Eliot, Part 1 15 

Adam Bede, Part II 15 

57. The Golden Shaft, by Gibbon 20 

58. Portia, by The Duchess 20 

69. Last Days of Pompeii, by Lytton..20 

60. The Two Duchesses, by Mathey. .20 

61. Tom Brown’s School Days 20 


ea, 


63 

64. 

65. 

66 . 

67. 

68 . 

69. 

70. 

71. 

72. 

73. 

74. 

75. 

76. 

77. 

78. 

79. 

80. 
81. 
82. 

83. 

84. 

85. 

86 . 

87. 

88 . 

89. 

90. 

91. 

92. 

93. 

94. 

95. 

96. 

97. 

98. 

99. 
100 . 

101 . 

102 . 

103. 

104. 

105. 

106. 

107. 

108. 

109. 

110 . 
111 . 
112 . 


. The Wooing O’t, by Mrs. Alex- 
ander, Parti IS 

The Wooing O’t, Part II 15 

The Vendetta, by Balzac ..20 

. Hypatia, by Chas. Kingsley, P’tl. 15 
Hypatia, by Kingsley, Part II — 15 

Selma, by Mrs. J. G. Smith 15 

Margaret and her Bridesmaids. .20 
Horse Shoe Robinson, Part I .... 15 
Horse Shoe Robinson, Part II... 15 

Gulliver’s Travels, by Swift 20 

Amos Barton, by George Eliot... 10 
The Berber, by W. E. Mayo-. ... .20 
Silas Mamer, by George Eliot. . . 10 

The Queen of the County 20 

Life of Cromwell, by Hood... 15 
Jane Eyre; by Charlotte Brontd.20 
Child’s History of England. .... .20 
Molly Bawn, by The Duchess. . .20 

Pillone, bv William BergsOe 15 

Phyllis, by The Duchess 20 

Eomola, by Geo. Eliot, Part I. . .15 
Romola, by Geo. Eliot, Part II. .15 

Science in Short Chapters 20 

Zangni, by Lord Iwtton 20 

A Daughter of Heth 20 

The Right and Wrong Uses of 
the Bible, \R. Heber Newton... 20 

N/ght and Morning, Pt. 1 15 

Night and Morning. Part II 15 

Shandon Bells, by Wm. Black. .20 

Monica, by the Duchess 10 

Heart and Science, by Collins. . .20 
The Golden Calf, by Braddon. . .20 

The Dean’e Daughter 20 

Mrs. Geoffrey, by The Duchess,. 20 

Pickwick Papers, Part 1 20 

Pickwick Papers, Part II 20 

Airy, Fairy Lilian, The Duchess. 20 
McLeod of Dare, by Wm. Black.20 
Tempest Tossed, by Tilton. P’t 1.20 
Tempest To8sed,by Tilton, P’t II 20 i 

Letters from H ig:h Latitudes , by i; 

Lord Dufferin .7 go 

Gideon Fleyce, by Lucy 20 

India and Ceylon, by E. Hseckel. .20 

The Gypsy Queen 20 

The Admiral’s Ward 20 

Nimpprt, by E. L. Bvnner, P’t I , .15 
Nimport, by E. L. Bynner, P’t II. 15 

Harry Holbrooke 20 

Tritofis, by E.L. Bynner, P’tl. . .15 
Tritons, by E.L. Bynner, P tII..15 
Let Nothing You Dismay, by 

Walter Besant lo 

Lady Audloy’s Secret, by Miss 

M. E. Braddon 20 

Woman’s Place To-day, by Mrs. 

Lillie Devereux Blake 20 

Dunallan, by Kennedy, Part I... 15 
Dunallan, by Kennedy, Part II. .15 
Housekeeping and Home-mak- ’ 

ing, by Marion Harland 16 

NoNewThmg,by W. E.Norri8.20 

The Spoopendyke Papers 20 

False Hopes, byGoldwin Smith. 15 

Labor and Capital 80 

Wanda, by Ouida, Parti..!.’.*.!!l5 
Wanda, by Ouida, Part II. . .... .16 


UNDER THE RED FLAG, 


CHAPTER I. 

GRETCHEN IN THE GARDEN. 

Stars shining in the deep purple of a summer sky ; June 
roses blooming and breathing sweetness on the soft, cool 
night ; leaves whispering ; low faint sounds of falling waters 
from a fountain hidden in the foliage ; and across the dim 
shadowy night the flaring lights and gaudy colors of a 
painted and gilded temple, in which the band is playing one 
of Strauss’s tenderest waltzes. 

The hiclodious strain is drawing to a close. The players 
attack the coda with crash and hurry, the pace intensifying 
as they near the end. All the Avaltzers have fallen out of 
the ranks, except one couple, and those two Avaltz as if it 
Avere imiiossible to tire — as if they were the very spirit of 
dance and melody, creatures of lire and air, motion incar- 
nate. 

The girl’s golden head reclmes against her partner’s 
shoulder, but not Avith an air of Aveariness ; the attitude ex- 
presses only repose ; the graceful, gliding step, the harmo- 
nious, flowing movements, are as natural as the fall of waters 
or the Avaving of forest boughs. The rosy lips are slightly 
parted, the sweet eyes look starAvards with a dreamy gaze. 
There is far more of spirit than of gross earthliness in the 
slim willowy form, the fair and radiant face, Avhich the stars 
and the lamps shine upon alternately, as those revolving 
figures circle— now in the glare of the orchestra, and then 
under those solemn worlds of light which are soon to look 
upon stranger, sadder, darker, crueller sights than this 
Sunday-evening dance at the Closerie des Lilas. 


4 


UNDER THE RED FLAG. 


There are some who think it is a wicked thing to dance 
on a Sunday evening, even after one has worshipped at one s 
parish church faithfully and reverently on Sunday morning ; 
some there are who think it is wicked to dance at all ; and 
there are others who worship in dancing, and are moved to 
wild leanings and whirlings by the spirit of piety ; others, 
again, who are devil-dancers, and worship the principle of 
evil in their demoniac gyrations. But,' assuredly, of all who 
ever danced upon this earth, none ever danced on the edge''^ 
of a more terrible volcano than that which trembled andj 
throbbed under the feet of those light- hearted revellers to- , 
night — happy, unforeseeing, rejoicing in the balmy breath 
of summer, the starlit sky, the warmth and the flowers, 
with no thought that this fair Paris, whitely beautiful in the 
sheen of starlight and moonlight, was like a phantasmal or 
fairy city— a city of palaces which were soon to sink in dust 
and ashes, beauty that was to be changed for burning, while 
joy and love fled shrieking from a carnival of blood and 
fire. 

Even to-night there were bystanders in the lami>lit gar- 
den who shooK their heads solemnly as they talked of the 
probability of war with Prussia. The battle of Sadowa had 
been the beginning of evil. France had played into the 
hands of her most dangerous rival, and had been swindled 
out of the price of her neutrality. To have allowed Austria 
to be crushed by Bismarck was worse than a crime, it was a 
blunder. And now all the signs and tokens of the time pointed 
to the likelihood of war. The day had come when the over- 
weening ambition of the house of Brandenburg inust be 
checked, and in the opinion of the Bonapartists tlie onus to 
fight was upon France. Oiflnion among the people was divided; 
and there were many who were friends of peace. A campaign 
would be a triumph for French arms, of course ; but such 
triumphs, however certain, are never won without loss. For 
France as a people, there must needs be profit and fame ; but 
for individuals— well, even in a succession of victories some 
French blood must be shed, some French corpses must lie 
scattered on distant battlefields— there must be cypress as 
well as laurel. 

Yet the idea of impending war was not unpleasant. It 
electrified the intellectual atmosphere, set the hearts of men 
and women throbbing with new hopes, new fears. To 
elderly people it seemed only the other day that the army 
was coming home in triumph after the Italian war, and 
France was crowning the liberators of a sister land ; but to 
the young people that Italian campaign seemed to have hai> 
pened a long while ago. It was time that France should 
arise in her might and strike a great blow. 

So the middle-aged folks, mere spectators of the evening’s 
amusement, put their heads together and discussed the po- 


UMDER the red el AC. 


5 

litical situation — some arguing from one point of view, some 
from another^ and those two waltzers circled faster and faster 
with the closing bars of the coda. With the last chord they 
stopped. The dark-haired young man withdrew his arm re- 
luctantly from his partner’s slim waist, and then they went 
off arm in arm towards the shadow of tne trees — dark-haired 
youth and fair-haired youth, all the world to each other, and 
infinitely happy. 

“ Faust and Marguerite,” said a corpulent citizen, who 
had been watching the dancers while he talked of Bismarck 
and the Due de Gramont. 

“ Happily I see no Mephistopheles,” replied his compan- 
ion. “ If the young people go to perdition it will be their own 
doing.” 

“ The girl is very pretty,” said the other, “ and I think I 
have seen her lover^a face before to-night.” 

“ He is to be seen any day at the Cafe Malmus. He is a 
journalist— a sprig of nobility, I believe, but as poor as Job. 
He writes for the papers. He ranks as an es2:>rit fort and 
something of a wit.” 

“ And the girl— do you know who she is ? She has hardly 
the air of a grisette.” 

“ She is like Mlsson in Marguerite. Ho, I’ll swear she is 
no grisette— nothing of the Mimi Pinson there-, my friend. I 
never saw her till to-night. Look yonder, just emerging from 
the trees : do you see ?” 

. “ Is it Mephistopheles ? ” 

“ Ho, but the spirit of evil in woman’s shape— envy, hatred, 
revenge, all incarnate in a jealous woman. Great Heaven, 
such a face — see, see ! ” 

His friend looked in the direction indicated. Yes ; there 
crept from the covert of the trees, stealthily, serpent-like, stole 
forth a woman— young, handsome, smartly dressed, with a 
])lack silk gown, and a bonnet all roses and lace— a shop- 
keeper in holiday attire. The face was dark with hatred and 
mance. The eyes were bright with angry fires. Slowly, 
stealthily, the footsteps followed in the path the lovers had 
taken— following as the shadow follows the sun, as night fol- 
lows day. 

But now the band struck up a quadrille composed of 
the liveliest airs from the “ Princesse de Trebizonde,” which 
had lately enchanted the boulevards ; and then began those 
wild choric measures in which Parisian youth excel all other 
nations. The hahiUies of the garden— the clerks and the 
shopmen and the commercial travellers, industrial and intel- 
lectual youth of every grade— began their diversions^ to the 
delight of the spectators. Legs were flung in the air, wild 
leapmgs and convulsive evolutions diversified the humdrum 
figures of the legitimate quadrille ; each dancer tried to out 
Herod his vis-a-vis. How the the right had it ; anon, by a 


6 


UNDER THE RED FLAG, 


still wider bound, the left triumphed ; while the lookers-qn 
laughed and applauded. But there was no offence in this 
outfoeak of muscular activity and high spirits. Sunday 
dances at these gardens are sacred to the people. There is 
very little mixture of the demi-monde on a Sunday evening \ 
the clerk and the counter-jumper, the little industries ot 
Paris, have the field to themselves. 

The journalist and his fair-iiaired sweetheart did not re- 
appear in the quadrille. They were sauntering side by side 
in the shadowy walks, hearing the Joyous music vaguely; 
for the lowest whisper of a lover’s voice has more power on 
the listening ear of love than the loudest orchestra that ever 
crashed and jingled in the music of “ Orphee aux Enfers ” or 
the “ Grande Duchesse.” 

“ Why should Rose doom us to wait,” pleaded the jour- 
nalist, bending his dark, ardent eyes on the fair, sweet face 
beside him. “ What does poverty matter, if we are true to 
each other and strong to conquer fortune, as we are, Kath- 
leen? We can bear a few privations in the present, knowing 
that Fate will be kinder in the future. I have won a shred 
of reputation already, though I write for such a wretched 
rag 01 a paper that I can earn very little money ; but fame 
will come and money will follow before we are ten years 
older. At my age Balzac was no richer than I am.” 

“ I am not afraid of poverty,” answered the girl gently. 
“ Wliy should I fear what I have known all my life ? Rose 
and 1 have always been poor, but we have always been 
happy ; except once, when she had the fever. Ah, that was 
heart-breaking! Ko money to pay a doctor, no money for 
wine or fruit or fuel, no money for the rent, and the deadly 
fear of being turned out of our lodging while she lay helpless 
and unconscious on her bed. Ko prospect but the hospital. 

^Yes, those were dark days. I almost envied the rich.” 

“Almost envied, my angel? I am made of a different 
stuff, and I hate and envy them at all times. That hatred 
gives bitterness to my pen — rancor, acidity, all the qualities 
our Parisians love. It is my chief stock-in-trade. 1 could 
not live without it.” 

“ Ah, you feel the sting of poverty more than I do, because 
you come of a race that was once rich, a family that was once 
noble.” 

“ Yes ; I come of a decayed race— worn out, effete, passed 
by in the press and hurry of a commercial age. That is why 
I hate the insolent roturier brood that have battened in the 
sunshine of imperial favor ; the stock-jobbers and gamblers, 
corrupt to the core, and swelling with pride in their dirty 
gold. My grandfather was a gentleman and a soldier ; he 
fought for his king till the last ray of hope had faded. And 
when his faithful little band of Chouans were scatterd or 
slain, and he had escaped by the skin of his teeth from being 


UNDER THE RED FLAG, 


1 

shot down by the Blues, he shut himself up in the old stone 
tower of his chateau, and lived among peasants, as peasants 
live, and let his son and daughter run wild. My father was 
very little in advance of his father’s farm-laborers in educa- 
tion or manners, when he entered the army, a lad of fifteen, 
soon after the restoration of the Bourbons. But he was one 
of the handsomest men of his day. He had good blood in 
his veins; and it seems somehow that. race will tell, for 
twenty years later he was one of the finest soldiers in the 
French army. He married a rich wife, loved her passion- 
ately, spent all her money, ruined her life, and died broken- 
hearted and a pauper within' a year of her death, leaving me 
to face the world, penniless, and with very few friends, at 
twelve years of age. The Empire was then in its golden 
dawn. One of my first memories is of the Coup cVetaL that 
awful night of the second of December, when the bullets 
whistled along the Boulevard Poissonniere, like the hail- 
stones in a summer storm, and the terrified wondering bour- 
geois were mown down like ears of corn. My father was at 
the head of his regiment that night ; and my mother and 1 
were looking down upon the scene from our apartment at a 
corner of the boulevard. Two years later I was an orphan.” 

‘‘ Oh, what a hard childhood and youth you must have 
had ! ” said Kathleen, full of pity. 

“Kot harder than yours, little one. You and the sister 
have not had too much of the sunshine of life, I take it.” 

“No, but we have always been together. We have faced 
the storm side by side ; or perhaps I ought to say that Bose 
has faced it bravely by herself, and sheltered me. But you 
have been' quite alone — no brother, no sister.” 

“ Not a creature of my own fiesh and blood,” answered 
Mortemay. “ If it had not been for a bluft' old brother-olficer 
of my father’s I must have starved, or been brought up on 
state charity. He got me a pension, just enough to pay my 
schooling in a humble way, n-om the emperor, in considera- 
tion of my father’s services on the second of December, but 
this allowance was to cease when I was eighteen. The in- 
-fiuence of my father’s old friend got me accepted at one of 
the finest schools near Paris, the school kept by the Domin- 
ican Fathers at Arcueil, where I was educated at a third of 
the pension paid for the other pupils, by the benevolence of 
the Prior, who pitied my desolate position. Here I remained 
till my eighteenth birthday ; and I ought to be a better man 
than 1 am after the care and kindness those good monks 
lavished upon me. When I left school the good old friend 
was dead, and from that time T have had to live — somehow 
—by my own labor of head or hands. I believe it is consid- 
ered the finest training for youth ; but it is hard, and it 
hardens the heart and the mind of a man.” 


8 


UNDER THE RED FLAG. 


“ Has it hardened your heart, Gaston ? ” asked the girl, 
drawing a little closer to him in the dim starlit avenue. 

“ To all the world— except to you.” 

And now, at a turn of the leafy path, they came suddenly 
face to face with another couple — a stalwart, broad-shoulder- 
ed man of about thirty, with a tall, good-looking young- 
woman upon his arm — at sight of whom Kathleen exclaimed 
lovii^ly, — 

“ Rose, where have Philip and you been hiding all the 
evening?” 

“We have been looking on at the dancers, Kathleen, 
answered Rose ; “ and now I think it is time we all went 
home.” 

“ So soon ? ” cried Kathleen. 

“ It has struck the three-quarters after ten. Did you see 
Madame Michel in her fine bonnet and gown? ” 

“ What, Suzon Michel of the cremerief ” asked Mortemar. 
“ Is she here to-night ? ” 

“ She is here every Sunday ni^t, I believe, and at the 
theatre three times a week,” said Hose’s companion, Philip 
Durand, as devoted to the elder sister as Gaston Mortemar 
was to the younger. “ That little woman has a pleasant life 
of it. She has saved money in that snug little shop of hers.” 

“ She is a vulgar coquette, and I hate the sight of her,” 
said Rose, sharply. 

This was a very ill-natured speech for Rose, who was 
usually the soul of kindness. 

“Pray, what has the poor little Suzon done to offend 
you ? ” asked Gaston, laughing at Rose’s impetuosity. 

“It is not what she has done, but what she is. I hate 
bold, bad women ; and she is both bold and bad.” 

“ This from you. Rose, who believe that the Gospel was 
something more than an epitome of the floating wisdom of 
the East! Have you forgotten the text, ‘Judge not, that ye 
be not iudged’ ?” ^ 

“ when I think or speak of Suzon Michel I forget that I 
am a Christian,” answered Rose, gravely. “ There is some- 
thing venomous about that woman. I loathe her instinct- 
ively, as- 1 loathe a snake. And now, Kathleen, we must 
really go home.” 

“One more round, just one more. Hark! there is the 
waltz from ‘ La Grande Duchesse,’ ” pleaded Gaston ; and, 
without waiting for permission, he drew his arm around 
Kathleen’s waist, and led her into the circle in front of the 
flaring orchestra, mider the summer stars. 


UNDER THE RED FLAG. 


9 


CHAPTER II. 

WAYSIDE FLOWERS. 

The Rue Git le Coeur is not one of the fashionable streets 
of Paris. It does not belong to the English quarter, or the 
American quarter, or the Legitimist quarter, or the Diplo- 
matic quarter ; the quarter of Art, or Learning, or Science, 
or the demi-monde, ileauty and fashion never visit the spot. 
It has hardly a place on the map of Paris. And yet, like 
many another such street, it is a little world in itself, and 
human beings are born and die in it, and passions pure and 
holy, and base and wicked, are nourished and fostered there ; 
and. comedies and tragedies are acted there, turn bv turn, as 
the wedding feast is spread, or the fmieral drapery liung out, 
black and limp and dismal, against the dingy ador-posts. 

Git le Coeur is a narrow, shabby little street, hidden some- 
where in the densely populated district between the Boule- 
vard St. Michel and' the Rue des Saints Peres. It is near 
the Quai des Augustins, which makes a pleasant promenade 
for its inhabitants on summer evenings, near the river, 
within sight of the mighty towers of N otre Dame, within 
sound of ner deep-toned bells. It is near the Morgue, and 
not very far from the hospitals; near the flower-market: 
near much that is central and busy, closely hemmed round 
with the teeming life of the workaday world of Paris; Imt 
very far from the haunts of pleasure, from the himous restau- 
rants, from clubs and cafes, from parks and parterres, from 
opera-house and aristocratic hotel. 

It is a narrow street — crooked, too — and the houses are of 
the shabbiest. In one of these houses, a liouse which lay 
back from the street, and, with three others, formed a stony 
quadrangle, enclosing a little yard, dwelt Rose and Kath- 
leen O Tiara, two sisters of Irish parentage, the daughters of 
a poor Irish gentleman, who had come here from the good 
city of Bruges in Flanders, just twelve years ago, and had 
occupied the same little apartment on the third story ever 
since. Just nineteen years ago Captain OTIara was living 
with a young second wife and a seven-year-old daughter, 
the issue of his first marriage, in the city of Brussels. He 
had been in the army, in the 87th Irish Fusileers, had run 
through his little patrimony, and had sold his commission, 
and thrown himself almost penniless on the world, after the 
manner of many other gentlemen, English as well as Irish. 
Twice had he married in ten years, and twice for love. 
Nothing could have been more honorable or less prudent 
than either marriage ; and now he was living from hand to 
mouth in furnished lodgings in Brussels, writing a little for 


lO 


UNDER THE RED FLAG. 


the English newspapers, getting a little help now and then 
from his own family, and now and then a ten-pound note 
from a wealthy maiden aunt of his wife’s — the aunt from 
whose handsome house in the Circus, Bath, pretty Kathleen 
Reilly had run away with her handsome captain. The aunt 
had not forgiven or taken her hack to favor ; hut she sent a 
little help occasionally, out of sheer charity, and always ac- 
companied by a lecture which gave a flavor of bitterness to 
the boon. 

Captain O’Hara and his wife were not unhappy, in spite 
of their precarious fortunes. It was summer, and the scent 
of the lime blossoms was in the air of the park and the bou- 
levards ; the lamplit streets and cafes were full of brightness 
and music in the balmy eventides of July. The young wife 
was looking forward tremblingly, yet hopefully, to the 
cares and joys of maternity. The dark-eyed stepdaughter 
adored her. Too young to remember her own mother, who 
had died in Bengal, where the girl was born, the child idol- 
ized the captain^ fair-haired wife, and was fondly loved by 
her in return. Never was there a happier family group than 
these three, and when the expected baby should come, it 
was to be a boy, the captain declared in the pride of his 
heart : a son and heir— heir to empty pockets, wasted oppor- 
tmiities, bankruptcy, and jail. He was pining for a son to 
perpetuate the noble race of O’Hara. The baby was to be 
christened Patrick, after some famous l^atrick O’Hara of 
days gone by, the age of war and chivalry, and poetry, and 
pride, when Ireland had not yet yielded her sweetness to the 
proud invader. 

Alas for the unborn child on whom such hopes had been 
founded, such dreams had been dreamt ! The fatal day of 
birth came, and the child was a giil ; and before the wail- 
ing infant was six days old the young, fair mother, with the 
rippling golden hair and innocent blue eyes, was lying in 
her coffin, strewn with white lilies and roses, and all the 
purest flowers of summer-tide. The brave young heart, 
which liad never flinched or faltered at poverty or trouble, 
was stilled forever. The wife who had been content to bear 
Fate’s worst ills with the husband of her choice was gone to 
the shadowy home where his love could not follow her. 

Captain O’Hara never looked the world or his difliculties 
bravely in the face after that day. He lived to see Kathleen 
a lovely girl of five years old, but he was a broken man from 
the day of his wife’s death. He roamed from foreign town 
to town, living anywhere for convenience or cheapness. He 
spent six montlis at Brest, a year in Jersey, the two girls 
with him everywhere, nursed and cared for by Bridget 
Ryan, the faithful Irish maid-servant who had taken Rose 
from the arms of her Indian ayah, and had followed the 
captain’s fortunes ever since. He led a wretched out-at- 


Under the red flag. 


elbows life, getting a little money by hook or by crook, and 
leaving a little tram of debts behind him, like the trail of the 
serpenL in every town he left. 

In Jersey, where cognac was conveniently cheap, the 
captain took to drinking a good deal— not in dreadful drink- 
ing-bouts, which would have frightened his poor children 
out of their senses, but in a gentle homceopathic sort of 
sottishness which kept his brain in a feeble state all day 
long, and gradually sapped his strength and his manhood. 
While the captain was dawdling away his day— strolling 
down to the tavern or the club, lounging on the esplanade, 
gossiping with the goers and comers, meeting old acquaint- 
ance, and sometimes getting an invitation to dinner, with a 
cigarette always between his lips — the two children, of whom 
the elder was not eleven, and the younger only four, used 
to play together all day upon the golden sands in front of 
their shabby lodgings, while the Irish nurse gossiped with 
the landlady, or sat in the sun darning and patching the 
children’s well-worn frocks or the captain’s decaying 
shirts. 

The two girls were happy in those sunny summer days 
by the sea, m spite of their poor lodgings and scanty fare. 
Fruit was cheap, and flowers were abundant everywhere, 
and there was no stint of bread and butter, and milk and 
eggs. The children wanted nothing better. But it was a 
dismal change for them when their father carried them back 
to Belgium, and established them in a stony street in Bruges, 
where the peaked roofs of the. opposite houses seemed to 
shut out the sun, and where, instead of the sweet, fresh 
odors of sea and seaweed, there was an everlasting stench of 
dried flsh and sewage. 

It was winter by this time, and it seemed to be the winter 
of their lives. Kathleen cried for the sea and the flowers of 
sunny Jersey. She could hardly be made to understand 
that summer was only a happy interval in the year, and 
that flowers do not grow in the stony streets of a city. The 
days in Bruges were cold and dismal, the evenings long and 
gloomy. If it had not been for Biddy Ryan the poor children 
might have pined to death in their solitude. Captain O’Hara 
was never at home in the evening, rarely at home in the 
afternoon, and he never left his bed till &e carillon at the 
cathedral had plaved that lovely melody of Beethoven’s, 
“ Hope told a flattering tale,” which the bells rang out every 
day at noontide. The captain found the cafe indispensable 
to his comfort, the petit verre cV absinthe suisse a necessity of 
his being, a game at dominoes or draughts the only dis- 
traction for the canker at his heart : thus the children, 
■ whom he loved fondly enough after his manner, were de- 
pendent on Biddy Ryan for happiness ; and the faithful soul 
did her utmost to cheer and amuse them in their loneliness. 


t2 


THE RED FLAG. 


She told them her fairy stories, the legends of her native 
Kerry ; She described the green hills and purple mountains, 
the lakes, the glens and gorges, the islands and groves and 
abbeys of that romantic county ; until Rose, who had seen 
but little of the grandeur and glory of earth, longed with a 
passionate longing for that land of lake and mountain, which 
Avas in somewise her own land, inasmuch as her father had 
l)een born and bred within a few miles of Killarney. 

And ye’ll both go there some day, my darlints,” said 
tender-hearted Biddy, “ and it’s ladies ye’ll be, and never a 
poor day ye’ll know in ould Ireland ) for by the Lord’s grace 
the captain’s rich cousins may all die off like ratten sheep, 
and his honor may come in for the estate ? There’s quarer 
things have happened than that in my knowledge, and sure 
it’s great hunters the gentleman are, and may ride home 
with broken necks any day.” 

^ Rose said she hoped her cousins would not die ; but she 
wished they would ask her father and all of them to go and 
live at the great white house near the lakes, which Biddy 
described as a grander place than the king’s chateau at 
Lacken, which she and Rose had been taken to see one day 
with the captain and his young wife, before Kathleen’s 
birth. 

The children were never tired of hearing Biddy talk of 
the lakes and mountains, the Druids’ Circle, MacGillycuddy’s 
Reeks, and the great house in which their father was born. 
It was their ideal of paradise, a home where sorrow or care 
could never enter ; gardens always full of flowers, a land of 
everlasting summer, woods and glens peopled with fairies, 
skies without a cloud, gladness without alloy. 

One gray, hopeless afternoon, when there had not been a 
rift in the slate-colored sky since daybreak, Kathleen sud- 
denly turned from the window, against which she had been 
flattening her pretty little nose, in the hopeless attenii)t 
to find amusement in looking into the empty street, and 
asked, — 

“ Does it ever rain in Ireland, Biddy ? ” 

“Yes, love, it does rain sometimes; and sure, darlint, 
that’s why the hills and the valleys are all so sgft and green. 
You wouldn’t have it always dhry ; the flowers wouldn’t 
grow without any rain.” 

“Must there be rain?” inquired Kathleen simply. “Papa 
says I mustn’t cry. Why should the sky cry? The sky is 
good, isn’t it?” 

“ Yes, dear ; it is God’s sky.” 

“ But papa says it’s naughty to cry.” 

The time came only too soon when very real tears, tears 
of passionate grief and wild despair, were shed in that dingy 
Belgian lodging ; and when the two children and their faith- 


UNDER THE RED FLAG. 


13 


ful servant found themselves alone in the bleak, strange 
world, face to face with starvation. 

The captain caught cold one bitter February night, coming 
home, in the teeth of the east wind, from his favorite cafe ; 
and although devotedly nursed by Biddy and Rose, who was 
sensible and womanly beyond her years, the cold* developed 
into acute bronchitis, under which James O’Hara succumbed, 
a few days after his thirty-seventh birthday, leaving his 
children penniless and alone in the world. There were only 
a few francs in the captain’s purse at the time of his death ; 
for the short, sharp illness had been expensive, albeit the 
English doctor, a retired navy surgeon, had been most modest 
in his charges. The captain’s watch and signet-ring were 
pledged to pay for the funeral ; and while the coffin was 
being carried to the cemetery, a letter, ill-spelled and ill- 
written, but full of tenderly womanly feeling, was on its way 
to the wealthy Miss Fitzpatrick of Bath, pleading for her 
orphaned great-niece Kathleen, and Kathleen’s penniless 
stepsister. 

Miss Fitzpatrick of Bath was a stanch Roman Catholic, 
and a conscientious woman ; but she was not a warm-hearted 
woman, and she was not deeply moved by the thought of the 
captain’s untimely death, or of his desolate children. She 
had been very angry with him for running away with her 
niece, who was also her companion and slave ; and she had 
never left off being angry ; yet she had given him money 
from time to time, considering it her duty, as a rich woman, 
to help her poor relations. And now she was not inclined to 
ignore that duty, or to deny the orphan’s claim. 

She went over to Bruges, saw tlie children, and in Kath 
leen beheld the image of her own dead sister’s little girl a- 
she had first seen her twenty years ago, when the orphan 
Avas sent to her rich aunt, as the legacy of a dying sister, the 
sole issue of a foolish marriage. And behold, here was 
another golden-haired child, sole issue of another foolish mar- 
riage, looking up at Theresa Fitzpatrick with just the same 
heaven-blue eyes, and the same scared, shrinking look, as 
doubting whether to find a friend or foe in the richly clad 
stately clame. 

If Miss Fitzpatrick had been of the melting mood, she 
Avould assuredly have taken the child to her heart and her 
home, and the child’s dark-eyed, frank-browed, lovable step- 
sister with her. There was ample room for both girls in the 
big handsome house at Bath — empty rooms, which no one 
ever visited save the housemaid, with her brooms and 
l)rushes ! luxuriously furnished rooms, swept and garnished, 
and kept in spotless order for nobody. ^ 

Although there was ample room in Miss Fitzpatrick’s 
house, there was no room in Miss Fitzpatrick’s heart for two 
orphans. 


14 


UNDER THE RED FLAG. 


“I shall do my duty to you, my dears,” she said, “ and I 
shall make no distinctions,although you. Rose, are no relation 
of mine, and have no claim upon me.” 

“You won’t take Rose away?” cried Kathleen, pale with 
terror, the blue eyes filling with tears. 

“Ko, my dear, I shall not separate you while you are so 
young,” answered Miss Fitzpatrick, complacently settling 
iierself in her sable-bordered mantle. “By and by, when you 
are young women, you will have to make your way in the 
world, and then you may be parted. But for the next few 
years you shall be together. How have they been educated ? ” 
she asked, appealing to Biddy, who stood by, curtseying every 
time she looKed her way. 

Sure, ma’am, my lady, the captain was very careful with 
them ; he’d never have let the dear childer out of his sight, 
only he wanted a little gentleman’s society now and then, 
blessed soul, and he liked to spend half an hour or so at a 
caffy. But many’s the day I’ve heard um reading poethr^ to 
the two childer, beautiful — Hamlick and the Ghost, and King 
Leerd, and Lilly O’Rourke. There never was a better father, 
if the Lord had been pleased to spare him,” concluded Biddy, 
with her apron at her eyes. 

“ My good woman, you do not understand my question,” 
said Miss Fitzpatrick, impatiently. “ I want to know what 
these children have been taught. I begin to fear they have 
been sorely neglected by that foolish man. Can. they read 
and write and cipher ? ” 

Biddy, hai*d pushed, was fain to confess that Kathleen did 
not even know her letters, and that Rose was very backward 
with her pen, though she could read beautifully. 

“ I thought as much,” said Miss Fitzpatrick. “ And now, 
Bridget Ryan, I’ll tell you what I mean to do ; you seem to 
liave been a faithful servant, so I shall not allow you to be a 
loser by Captain O’Hara’s death. I shall pay you your wages 
in full, and send you home to Ireland.” 

“ With the young ladies ? ” asked Biddy, beaming. 

“ What should tlie young ladies do in Ireland ? ” exclaimed 
Miss Fitzpatrick ; “ they haven’t a friend in that wretched 
country. Ko, you can go back to your home, for I suppose 
you have some kind of home to go to. But I snail place the 
two young ladies in a convent I have been told about, three 
miles from this city, where they will be carefully educated 
and kindly looked after by the good nuns. I shall pay tor 
their schooling and provide their wardrobes till they are 
grown up ; but when they conie to nineteen or twenty, they 
will have to earn their own living. The better they are edu- 
cated the easier they will find it to earn their bread.” 

Biddy could but confess that Miss Fitzpatrick, upon whom 
the elder sister had no shadow of claim, was acting very gen- 
erously ; yet she was in despair at the thought of being sep- 

.V 


UMDER THE RED FLAG. 


IS 

arated from the children she had nursed, and who were to 
her as her own flesh and blood. If Miss Fitzpatrick had sent 
them all three to Ireland, and given her a cottage, a potato- 
field, and a pig, she felt she could have worked for the two 
children, and brought them up in comfort, and been as happy 
as the days were long. They would have rmi about the fields 
barefoot, and with wild uncovered hair, and made a friend 
and companion of the pig, but they would have grown up 
strong and beautiful in that free life ; and it seemed to her 
that such a life would be ever so much happier for them than 
the enclosed convent in the flat, arid country outside Bruges, 
the grim white house within high walls, the tall, slated root 
of which she and her charges had seen one day in their after- 
noon walk. 

She accepted her wages from Miss Fitzpatrick, but she 
declined the fare home to Ireland. 

“ It may be long days before I see that blessed country,” 
she said, “ for, with all submission to your ladyship, I shall 
try to get a place in Bruges, so that I may he near these 
darling childer, and gladden my eyes with the sight of them 
now and then, as the good nuns give lave.” 

Miss Fitzpatrick had no objection to this plan. She was a 
good woman, according to her lights, but as hard as a stone. 
She wanted to do her duty in a prompt and business-like 
manner, and to provide for these orphans ; not because she 
cared a straw for them, but because they were orphans, and 
to feed the widow and the orphan is the business of a good 
Catholic. 

She put the two girls into a fly next morning, after spend- 
ing an uncomfortable night at the best hotel in Bruges, 
where the foreign arrangements and the all-pervading odors, 
afflicted her sorely, and drove straight off to the Sisters of 
Sainte Marie. 

Here, in a rambling, -chilly-looking house, with large 
whitewashed, carpetless rooms, and corridors smelling of 
plaster, Miss Fitzpatrick handed the orphans over to the 
Reverend Mother, a stout, comfortable-looking Belgian, who, 
for a payment in all of ninety pounds a year, was to lodge, 
feed, clothe, and educate the two children from January to 
December. There were to be no vacations — the school year 
was to be really a year. Children who had parents might 
go home for a summer holiday ; but for these orphans the 
white walled convent, in its flat, sandy garden, was to be the 
only home. 

And now there began for these two orphan sisters a new 
life— very strange, very cold and formal, after the life they 
had led with the careless yet loving father and the devoted 
nurse. It was a life of rule and routine, of work and dep- 
rivation. The convent school was a cheap school, and though 
the sisters were conscientious in their dealings with their 


i6 


UNDER THE RED FLAG. 


pupils, the fare was of the poorest, the beds were hard and 
narrow, the coverlets were thin, dormitories draughty and 
carpetless, everything bleak and bare. The children rose at 
unnatural hours in the cold, dark mornings, and were sent 
to bed early to save fire and candle. It was a hard life, with 
scarcely a ray of sunshine. Some of the nuns were kind and 
some 01 the nuns were cross, just as women are outside con- 
vent walls. There were no pleasures, there was very little 
to hope for ; the nuns were too poor to afford pleasure for 
their pupils. Chapel and lessons, lessons and chapel ; chapel 
twice a day, lessons all day long ; that was the round, of life. 
Half an hour’s recreation now and then— just one brief half- 
hour of leisure and play, if the children had strength to play, 
after two long hours bending over books, puzzling over 
sums. 

Rose bore her trials like a heroine. Kathleen fretted a 
good deal at first, and then, when she grew older and stronger, 
she became a little inclined to occasional outbreaks of rebel- 
lion. She had a sweet, loving nature, and could be ruled 
easily by love — by threats or hard usage not at all. The 
nuns, happily, were fond, of her, and petted her for her beauty 
and brightness and graceful ways. While dark, proud Rose, 
earnest, thoughtful, laborious, plodded on at her studies, 
always obedient, always conscientious, Kathleen learned by 
fits and starts, was sometimes attentive, sometimes neglect- 
ful, sometimes industrious to fever-point, sometimes incor- 
rigibly idle. She had all the freaks of genius. 

Life went on thus with a dismal monotony for five long 
years ; till it seemed to the sisters as if they could never have 
known any world outside those convent walls, any horizon 
beyond that western line of level marsh and meadow, where 
they used to watch the sun going down in a golden bed be- 
hind the tall black poplars. To Kathleen it seemed as if the 
old sweet life, with father and nurse, must have been a 
dream. One bitter i^rief had come to them in the last year. 
The good, faithful Biddy was dead. It had been her custom 
to visit them on the last Saturday in every month for an 
hour in the afternoon, by special permission of the Superior ; 
and neither storm nor rain, snow nor hail, had ever kept 
Biddy away. Her visit was a, bright spot in the lives of the 
gills. They clung to her and loved her in that too brief hour 
as if she had been verily their mother. The vulgar Irish 
face, the hands hardened by toil, the coarse, common clothes, 
were, to them, as dear as if she had been the finest lady in 
the land. She came to them laden with fruit and cakes’ she 
brought them bright-colored neck ribbons to enliven their 
sombre black uniform. She told them her scraps of news 
about the outside world. She walked with them in the gar- 
den, or sat with them in the visitors’ parlor, and they were 
utterly happy so long as she stayed. 


tfNDkR THE RED FLAG, 


At last, after they had been four years and a half in the 
convent, there came one never to be forgotten Saturday on 
which there was no visitor for the Demoiselles O’Hara. It 
was a beeiiess June day, and the girls had pictured Biddy 
as she walked along the sandy road from Bruge^ where 
she had a hardish place as maid-of-all-work in a Flemish 
tradesman’s family. They fancied how she would enjoy the 
sunshine, and the hedges all in flower, and the song of the 
lark. If they could but be with her, thought Kathleen, 
dancing along beside her, gathering the wild flowers ! But 
hark ! there was the convent clock striking three. In anoth- 
er moment the bell would ring, the loud, harsh bell, which 
sounded so sweet upon that one mrticular afternoon. Bid- 
dy was the soul of punctuality. The clock had seldom fin- 
ished striking before the bell rang. The girls were sitting 
in the garden, as near the gateway and the porter’s lodge as 
they were alibwed to go. They waited and waited, listening 
for the bell which never rang ; which never was again to be 
rung by that honest hand. At last the clock struck four, and 
they knew that all hope was over for that day. From three to 
four was the hour appointed by authority for Biddy’s \isit. 
She would not presume to come after that hour. 

“ There will be a letter to-morrow, perhaps,” said Rose, 
with a sigh. “ Poor dear Biddy ! It is such an effort for her 
to write.” 

But the days went by, and there was no letter. The last 
Saturday in July came, and there had been no sign or token 
from Biddy. The rules of the convent school were strict, 
and the girls were allowed to write to no one except rela- 
tions. 

That last Saturday in July was a dull, stormy day, a sul- 
len, sultry day, with heavy thunder-showers. Again the two 
girls pictured their friend upon the sandy road, this time 
wrapped in her Irish frieze cloak, the county woman’s cloak 
which she had worn ever since Rose could remembei^ and 
struggling against the storm with her stout Belgian umbrel- 
la of dark-red cotton. But the clock struck three, and the 
clock struck four, the girls waiting through the hour with lis- 
tening ears and beating hearts, and there was no touch oi 
Bridget Ryan’s hand upon the convent bell. 

Then Pvose grew desperate, and went straight to the he\- 
erend Mother, and asked permission to write ^ 

must be ill, or surely she would have come, 
hesitated a little ; rules were strict,^ and if once broken a^a 
so on and so on. But the pale, anxious face and teariul eyes 
touched her, and she gave the required permission ana tne 
necessary postage stamp. . i 

Three days Rose and Kathleen waited anxiously for tne 
reply to their letter, and then came a formal epistle from a 
lawyer in Bruges, who had the honor to acquaint the young 


UNDEN THE RED FLAG. 


i8 

ladies that their late father’s old servant, Madame Ryan, had 
died at midnight on the last Saturday in June, after a very 
short illness, and that she had bequeathed the whole of her 
savings to Mademoiselle Rose O’Harja, said savings amount- 
ing, after payment of funeral expenses, to live hundred and 
fifty francs. 

Deep and hitter was the grief of the sisters at the loss of 
this faithful friend— the only woman friend whose warm 
motherly love Kathleen had ever known. Rose gave a hun- 
dred francs to the Reverend ^lother to he spent in masses for 
the beloved dead. Kathleen wanted her to devote all the 
money to that sacred purpose. 

“ What do we want with the poor darling’s money ? ” she 
asked. 

“Nothing now, dear,” answered the more experienced 
elder sister ; “ but the day may come when a little money 
will save us from a good deal of misery.” 

The day came when those few gold pieces, which Rose 
kept under lock and key with all her little treasures in a 
small japanned box that had belonged to her father, made 
the two girls independent of tyranny, or that which seemed 
to them as tyranny of an altogether unbearable kind. 

The good Reverend Mother, under whose firm but friendly 
rule Rose and Kathleen had grown up, one to a tall, well 
developed girl of eighteen, the other to a slim sapling of 
eleven, was transferred to a larger and wealthier convent^ 
and was replaced by a sour-visaged nun whose piety was of 
the gloomy order, and who wanted to rule the community 
with a rod of iron. Everything was changed under her 
dominion, every rule made more severe, every little innocent 
pleasur-e curtailed or forbidden. A dark pall came dovui 
upon the convent, and discontent brooded like an evil pres- 
ence by the hearth. 

Kathleen, in high health, active, full of life and spirits, 
was one of the first to break the new rules. Her gayety was 
misconduct, her fresh, ringing laugh an offence. She was 
continually getting into disgrace ; and Rose, who saw her 
punished by all sorts of small privations and by the burden 
of extra tasks, rebelled in her heart against the tyrant, 
although she urged her young sister to submission and 
obedience. 

There came a day— a bright summer day— when the pun- 
ishment lesson was heavier than usual, although Kathleen’s 
offence had been of the slightest kind. 

“ Kathleen O’Hara has an obstinate temper and it must 
be conquered,” said the Reverend Mother, when she was 
told of a blotted exercise or a little outbreak of temper. 

To-day Kathleen had a headache. She was flushed and 
feverish, overcome by the midsummer heat. Just a year 
had gone since Bridget’s death, and it seemed to both girls 


UNDER THE RED FLAG, 


19 

as if that year had been the longest in their lives — the longest 
and most unhappy. The child made a feeble effort to write 
the German exercise which had been given to her as a i)un- 
ishment task ; but soon gave up altogether, and sat crying, 
with the book open before her, and the sun pouring its 
fierce light upon her flushed, tear-stained face. 

This was taken for rank contumacy, and when the Kever- 
end Mother came upon her round of inspection from a 
superior class, she ordered Kathleen off to a room at the top 
of the house, a bare garret under ttie thin, hot roof, which 
was used only for solitary confinement in very bad cases. It 
was the black-hole of the convent. 

Kathleen was marched up to this place of durance vile, 
and kept there till evening prayers, with the refreshment 01 
a slice of black bread— sucm bread as the coachmen give their 
horses in that country— and a cup of water. In the cool 
eventide she was let out of her prison, which had been like 
an oven all day, and she and Rose lay down together side by 
side in their narrow beds at the end of the long dormitory, 
nearest the door. 

When all the others were asleep Rose knelt by her sister’s 
bed, and kissed and comforted her ; but the child w^as broken- 
hearted. She said she would die in that miserable house. 
Lessons were given to her which she could not learn, and 
then she was punished for not learning them. She had been 
frightened in that dreadful room. She had heard things — 
awful things — running about behind the walls, squeaking 
and screaming. She thought they were demons. 

“ They were rats, darling,” said Rose, caressing and sooth- 
ing her. “ You shall never, never be put in that room again, 
if you will be brave, and trust me.” 

Rose shuddered at the thought of that stifling garret, 
under the burning roof, and the rats running about behind 
the wainscot. She had heard of children being eaten alive 
by rats. * 

“ Shall we steal out of the house to-morrow morning as 
soon as it is light, and go away and live by ourselves 
somewhere ? ” sue asked, in a whisper. 

It was an hour after bedtime ; the other children were all 
snoring on their hard little bolsters. There was no one to 
overhear the sisters as they whispered and plotted. It was 
no new thought with Rose O’Hara. She had been meditating 
upon it for a long time, ever since the new rule had begun 
and had made Kathleen unhappv- ^he had never forgotten 
those words of Miss Fitzpatrick's : ^ “When you are grown 
up ydu will have to get your own living, and then you may 
have to be parted.” The very thought of severance from 
Kathleen, this only beloved of her heart, was despair. Rose 
made up her mind that there should be no such parting. 
Why should they network and live together? Rose felt 


50 


VNDEk THE RED El AC. 


herself strong and brave, and able to work for both. She 
had wasted no opportunity that the convent afforded her. 
She had learned all that her teachers had given her to learn, 
and now felt herself able to teach as she had been taught. 
If Miss Fitzpatrick were left free to plan their lives, she and 
her sister would be parted ; but if she took their fate into her 
own hands, they could spend their lives together— prosper 
or fail together ; and, in her young hopefulness, it seemed to 
her that failure was hardly possible. 

She whispered the plan to Kathleen. They were to get up 
at daybreak— at the first glimmer of light— dress themselves 
and creep out of the dormitory and down the stairs, with 
their shoes in their hands. The door opening into the garden 
was bolted only. They had nothing to do but draw back the 
heavy bolts noiselessly. The garden' was guarded by high 
walls, except in 6ne weak point, which the girls knew well. 
An older wall, only eight feet high— a ponderous old wall, 
with heavy buttresses of crumbling brick — divided the west- 
ern side of the garden from an extensive orchard sloping 
down to the river. 

This wall had been scaled by many a young rebel, in quest 
of plums and pears, and it would be no obstacle to the 
sisters’ escape. Rose would take a change of linen in a little 
bundle, and her fortune of fifteen gold pieces, Biddy’s legacy, 
in her pocket ; and with this stock of worldly wealth they 
\vould make their way to Paris, that wonderful, beautiful, 
city, of which they had heard so much from some of their 
schoolfellows, the daughters of Parisian tradesmen, who had 
been sent to the Belgium convent for cheapness. 

“Are we going to walk all the way?” asked Kathleen. 

“ Kotallthe way, darling. We can go by rail. But if 
we find the journey would cost us too much we might walk 
part of the way.” 

“ I will walk as far as you like ; I am not afraid,” said 
Kathleen. ^ 

^ Their scheme prospered. In the dewy morning they 
climbed the crumbling orchard-wall, where there was plenty 
of foothold on the broken brick, and ran across the wet grass 
to the edge of the river, following which they came to the 
high-road. They avoided Bruges, the city of church towers, 
and steep roofs, and many bridges, and made for the road to 
Court-rai. Their first day’s journey of fifteen miles was over 
a dusty road— long, dreary, monotonous— a long and weary 
walk ; but they rested on the way at a cottage, where they 
enjoyed a meal of bread and fruit which cost them only a 
few pence. Not for years had they so relished any feast as 
they enjoyed this dinner of black bread and black cherries, 
which they ate in a little arbor covered with a hop-vine, in a 
corner of the cottage garden. They were three days on the 
road to Courtrai, sleeping in humble cottages, and living on 


UNDER THE RED FLAG. 


21 


the humblest fare. At the railway station at Courtrai, Rose 
found that the price of railway tickets to Paris, even the 
cheapest they could buy, would make a great hole in their 
little fortune ; so she and Kathleen decided that they would 
walk all the way. It was along journey, but not so long as 
that of the Scotch girl whom Rose hael read about in Sir 
Walter Scott’s story. 

“ I should like to walk,” said Kathleen. “I have been so 
happy to-day— no lessons, no one to scold us. The sky, and 
the flowers, and the fields all to ourselves.” 

Rose found a decent lodging for the night in a weaver’s 
cottage, and they started next morning on the road to Paris, 
Kathleen as merry as a lark. Rose happy, but with a grave 
sense of responsibility. 

They were weeks upon the road, in the balmy summer 
weather, walking and walking, oh and on, under a cloudless 
blue sky; for the heavens favored them, and the peerless 
July weather lasted all through their journey, save on one 
day when they were caught in a thunderstorm, and had to 
take refuge in a deserted stable, where they sat crouched to- 
gether in a dark corner, while the thunder rolled over the 
broken thatch, and the lightning sent lances of fire zigzag- 
ging across the dusky gloom. 

They were often very tired ; they were often half choked 
and half blinded by the chalky dust of the long, level roads ; 
but they were happy ; for they were together, and they were 
free.. It was the first real holiday they had known since they 
had entered at the convent gate. No lessons, no burdens of 
any kind. Every day they knelt in the cool shade of some 
strange church to pray. They heard the mass sung by 
strange priests before village altars. They found friends at 
the cottages where they lodged. The women all admired 
Kathleen’s golden hair and blue eyes, and sympathized with 
the sisters when told that they were orphans beginning the 
world together. No one overcharged or robbed ttiem. They 
were treated generously everywhere. Their very defence- 
lessness was their shield and breast-plate. 

And thus through toil, that had none of the bitterness of 
toil, they slowly approached the great city, which to tlieir 
young imaginations was like a fairy city. They did not quite 
believe that the streets were paved with gold, but they fan- 
cied life would be very easy there, and that their hearts would 
be always light enough to enjoy the sparkle of the fountains, 
the glory of the broad, strong river, the perfume of flowers, 
the beautiful churches and beautiful theatres, and shining 
lamplit boulevards, about which their schoolfellows had 
told them so much. 


22 


UNDER THE RED FLAG. 


CHAPTER III. 

Kathleen’s lover. 

The first sensation with both sisters, when they came 
within view of the mighty city, was disappointment. Rose 
felt her heart sink within her. The houses were so high, 
the streets so long and dreary ; the city seemed a wilderness 
of stone and plaster. All the trees on the boulevards — those 
lon^ new boulevards by which they entered Paris — were 
white with dust, and had a withered look. The houses had 
a i)overty-stricken air, despite their size and newness. They 
looked like big white jails. As for flowers or fountains, 
parks or gardens, there Avas no si^n of any such thing. 

“ What an ugly place ! ” cried Kathleen, piteously. 
“ Those girls at the convent must have been horrid story- 
tellers.” 

They tramped on and on, till at last they came to the 
heart oi the toAvn, to the place of fountains arid palaces and 
gardens and flowers. It Avas in the summer sunset. All 
things Avere gilded Iw that western radiance. Soldiers Avere 
marching along the Rue de Rivoli, drums heating, trumpets 
blaring. Lamps Avere lit in all the cafes, crowds of peoiile 
were sitting about in the open streets, the concerts in tlie 
Champs Elysees were beginning their music and song, myriad 
little lampions shining and twinkling in the last rays of the 
pun. Cleopatra’s Needle, fountains, palace, soldiers, statues, 
trees, floAvers, all fused themselves into one dazzling picture 
before the eyes of the two bewildered, wearied young travel- 
lers. 

“ Oil, Rose, how beautiful ! how beautiful ! ” gasped 
Kathleen, breathless with rapture. “ Hoav hajipy Ave shall 
be. here ! ” 

But while they stood admiring the fountains, listening to 
the martial music, the shades of evening were descending, 
and they had still to find a shelter for the night. Useless to 
look for such a shelter in this region of palaces. Rose took 
her sister by the hand and Avalked on, trusting to fate to 
carry them to some humble district, Avhere they might find 
friends and economical fare, as they had done everywhere 
on the Avay — thanks to Rose’s instinct for discovering the 
fittest places, the right people. 

^ Stars Avere beginning to flash and tremble upon the blue 
river as the orphans Avent over the bridge beyond the Louvre 
into that poorer Paris on the left bank of the Seine. Here 
they roamed about in the twilight till they drifted, somehow, 
into the Rue Git le Coeur ; and at the door of one of the 


UNDER THE RED FLAG. 


^3 


shabby old houses Rose saw a fat, middle-aged matron, with 
a good-natured face, of whom she asked for advice as to a 
lodging. ' 

The matron heard her story, and at once spread her 
motherlj^ wing over both girls. There was a gcirni^ a furn- 
ished third floor in the middle house in the yard. The 
rooms were small ; just two little rooms and a tiny closet 
for kitchen ; quite big enough for two girls. She led the 
way, introduced Rose to the co7icierge—\Y]\o^Q husband was 
a shoemaker, occupying the basement of the house — and who 
went panting up the narrow stair, key in hand, to show the 
lodging. 

It was very small, very shabby ; and cheap although it 
was, the rent seemed a great deal to Rose, after her experi- 
ence of village lodgings on the way ; but her new friend told 
her she might walk miles and get nothmg so cheap in all 
Paris ; so she took heart, and hired the apartment for a 
month certain, paying the fifth of her golden pieces, of which 
she had spent just four upon the road, as an instalment of 
the rent. And then, still directed by her stout friend, she 
went to a cremeiHe round the corner, and bought some milk 
and rolls and a little cheese for supper ; and the sisters sat 
down in their new home, so bare of many things essential 
for comfort, and laughed and cried over their first meal in 
1/aris. Kathleen was almost hysterical with fatigue and ex- 
citement. All the way they had come, even in the midst 
of her girlish gladness, she had been haunted by fears of 
pursuit. The Reverend Mother would send the gardener 
after her, and have her taken back and shut up in the sun- 
baked room where the rats lived. 

“But now we are safe,” she said, with her head on her 
sister’s shoulder, and Rose’s arm round her, “ we are safe in 
Paris ; and if Reverend Mother sends after us, we’ll go h) 
the emperor and ask him to' take care of us. We are his 
subjects now.” This was in 1862, when the empire was in 
its glory, aiid there was a sense of power and splendor in 
ilie'thifd Napoleon’s dominion over this beautiful modern 
Babylon, such as must have been felt in Rome under the, 
l)olitic sway of Augustus. These girls felt as if they were 
in a fortress, iiow they were within the charmed circle of 
imperial magnificence. 

Years of struggle and povertykand industry and self- 
denial came after that ha]w evening when the girls sat in 
the tAvilight, dreaming of a bright future ; but though the 
training was severe, it was, perhaps, the best and noblest 
school in which humanity can be educated. The sisters 
were never unhappy, for they were together, and they were 
free. Rose was sister, mother, guardian, all the world of 
love and shelter for Kathleen, who bloomed into exquisite 


24 


UNDER THE RED FLAG. 

loveliness in that humble Parisian lodging, a fair flower 
blossoming unseen, with, happily, few to note her beauty. 

Kose found only too soon that education was a drug in 
the Parisian markets. After heroic efforts to get em^oy- 
ment as a morning governess in a tradesman’s familj, she 
fell back upon the only industry which offered itself, and, 
by the help of her first Parisian friend, Madame Schubert, 
the stout matron who had found her a lodging, she got em- 
ployment as an artificial flower-maker, in which art she pro- 
gressed rapidly, and, in a couple of years, attained a perfec- 
tion which insured her liberal wages — wages which enabled 
her to maintain the little lodging, and feed and clothe her- 
self and her sister. The fare was of the simplest, and there 
was a good deal of pinching needed to make both ends meet 
in that luxurious, expensive city of Paris ; especially in win- 
ter, when fuel made such an inroad upon the slender purse ; 
but somehow the girls never knew actual privation, never 
went to bed hungry, or were hamited in their slumber by 
the nightmare of debt. The little rooms on the third story 
were tne pink of neatness. Kathleen was housekeeper, and 
her busy hands swept and dusted and polished, and kept all 
things bright. The modest gray or brown merino gowns 
were never shabby or dilapidated. Collars and cuffs were 
always spotless, and the little feet neatly shod. There were 
always a few halfpence for the bag at Kotre Dame, and there 
was always a loaf to divide with a poor neighbor, or a cup 
of soup for a sick child. 

On the other hand, the pleasures of the sisters were of 
the rarest, and, perhajps, that is why they were so sweet. A 
steamboat excursion once or twice in a long summer to some 
suburban village that Avas almost the country ; a visit to a 
cheap boulevard theatre once or twice in the long winter. 
But oh, how heavenly was the scent of lime-blossoms, how 
exquisite the verdure of summer meadows, to those who 
tasted the luxury so seldom ! And how vivid and real was 
that sham world of the stage to those who so seldom saw the 
curtain rise upon that paint and tinsel paradise ! 

Ivose and Kathleen lived as humbly as grisettes Live, and 
dressed as grisettes dress ; but they preserved the secluded 
habits of English ladies— knew no one, and spoke to no one, 
outside the narroAv enclosure of that little stone-paved yard 
in tlie Rue Git le Coeur, with its three houses divided ’ into 
about twenty domiciles. Among these dwellings the sisters 
had made a few respectable acquaintances, including Madame 
Schubert, the stout matron, who grew more and more obese 
as the years went by, who was described somewhat vaguely 
as a petit rentier whose only business in life was to know 

the business of her neighbors, and to attend upon an ancient 
coffee-colored pug almost as obese as herself. 

As she was their first, so was Madame Schubert their best 


UNDER THE RED EL AG. 


25 

and most intimate friend, and, indeed, the one only person 
whom the Demoiselles O’Hara visited and received in this 
vast city of Paris. She was always their companion and 
protectress in those happy excursions to the country^ those 
tairy-like nights at the theatre. It was she who simphed the 
secluded damsels with news of the outside world. She knew, 
or pretended to know, everything that was going on in Paris ; 
and she certainly did know everything that went on in the 
Rue Git le Coeur. 

It was Madame, or, in familiar parlance, Maman, Schu- 
liert, who gave Rose and Kathleen the first information 
about a new lodger who had taken up his abode in the two 
little garrets over their own apartment — a young man with 
a handsome face, and gent%l—2)h., but how gentil ! tout-a-fait 
talon rouge. He would bear comparison with any gandin on 
the boulevard, although his coat looked as if it had been well 
worn, and all his worldly goods consisted of one battered 
portmanteau and an old egg-box full of books. 

“ He writes for the papers — for the Drapeau RougeJ^ said 
Maman Schubert. “ I have seen the printer’s devil going 
upstairs with proofs. But he is not rich, this youth, for he 
breakfasts at Suzon Michel’s cremerie^ and he often buys a 
slice of Lyons sausage and a loaf as he goes home in the after- 
noon, when other young men are going to their favorite res- 
taurant.” 

“ Dear maman, how is it that you know everything about 
everybody ? ” exclaimed Rose. 

she had met the new lodger on the stairs that morning, 
and could not deny his good looks. He was tall and slim. 
He had dark eyes — eagle eyes — and a black mustache, and 
features as clearly cut as a profile on a Roman cameo. 

“ I have eyes and ears, and a heart to symi)athize with 
my neighbors in their joys and sorrows,’'’ said Madame 
Schubert. “ One might as well be the statue of King Henry 
on the Pont Keuf as go through the world caring for nobody 
but one’s self.” 

This was a clever way of making a feminine vice seem a 
virtue ; but Maman Schubert was really a good soul, and al- 
ways ready to help a poor neighbor. She was very fond of 
the O’Hara girls, and already she had begun to build her 
little castles in the air for their benefit. Rose was to marry 
Philip, that honest young mechanic from the far South, be- 
yond Carcassonne, who was doing so well as a journeyman 
cabinet-maker, and who was something of an artist in his 
way, and thus a little above the average mechanic. And 
now here there had drcmped from the sky, as it wer^ the 
very lover of lovers for Kathleen— young, handsome, refined, 
as charming as a lover in a play. 

Maman Schubert told herself it was high time Kathleen 
should have a lover, whose duty it would be to protect and 


26 


UNDER THE RED FLAG. 


cherish her, and to marry lier so soon as ever they were rich 
enough to marry. She was much too prettj^ to remain un- 
guarded by a strong man’s love. For such fresh and iimo- 
cent loveliness Paris was full of snares ; she could not go 
the length of a street alone without encountering perils. 
The wolf was always on the watch for this lamb. Hose 
O’Hara’s avocations compelled her to be absent all day long, 
and she was obliged to mew her young sister in the little 
sitting-room, forbidding her to go a step beyond her daily 
marketing within a narrow radius of the Rue Git le Coeur. 

The wolf, as represented by the gandin or petit creve^ was 
not often on the prowl in this humble locality. The pave- 
ments were too rough for his dainty boots, the region alto- 
together too shabby for his magnificence. But from the 
Sorbonne, from the Luxembourg, and from the Hotel Hieu 
issued wolves of another and rougher species— students of 
all kinds ; and Rose lived in ever-present fear lest one of 
these should assail her cherished lamb. Maman Schubert 
was often too lazy to go marketing ; and then Kathleen must 
needs go alone on her little errands to the green-grocer, or 
the pork-butcher, or the cremerie. 

The cremerie was just round the corner— one of the neat- 
est, daintiest little shops in Paris, or at least it was so 
thought by the inhabitants of Git le Coeur, who patronized 
it liberally. It was a tiny shop in a narrow street, and one 
descended to it by two stone stejjs, trodden hollow and slop- 
ing by pilgrims in past ages ; for the shop was an old shop, 
coeval Avith the departed glories of the Faubourg St. Ger- 
main. It was cellar-like and dark, but that^was an advan- 
tage on a hot summer day. It was cool and shadowy, like a 
rustic dairy, and it was clean— ah, how it Avas clean! You 
might have offered a napoleon for every cobweb to be found 
in Suzon Michel’s shop, Avithout fear of being out of pocket 
by your offer. The little tables at which Suzon’s customers 
breakfasted Avere of spotless marble. Her thick Avhite crock- 
ery had never a stain or a smear. Her brass milk-cans and 
tin coffee-pots were as bright as silver in a silversmith’s 
shop. 

It Avas in this half-underground apartment that Gaston 
Mortemar, the young journalist, took his breakfast every 
day — coffee and eggs, roll and butter, occasionally diversified 
by a plate of radishes. 

This simple and wholesome fare Avas enlivened by the so- 
ciety of Madame Michel, a buxom black eyed Avidow of six- 
and-twenty, who had ahvays the last neAvs of the quarter, 
and a cheery Avord for every comer, and who found a great 
deal to say to this particular customer. She stood behind 
her bright little counter, flashing her knitting-needles, or 
moved deftly about the shop, polishing and arranging lier 
pots and pans, Avhile Gaston Mortemar breakfasted, and that 


UNDER THE RED FLAG. 


27 

hour seemed to her always the brightest in the day. By the 
time he had lived six months in the Rue Git le Coenr they 
were on very intimate terms. She used to upbraid him if 
he were five minutes later than his usual hour, and she 
would pout and look sorrowful if he seemed in haste to de- 
part. Once she served him a better breakfast than he had 
ordered, and wanted to supply him with a dainty dish gratis ; 
but Monsieur Mortemar drew the line here. His angry flush 
and haughty frown told the little widow that she had gone 
too far. 

“ Iflease to remember that I am a gentleman, and not a 
pique-assiette^^ he said, “and that I eat nothing I cannot pay 
for.” 

Madame shrugged her shoulders, and said it was hard she 
could not ofiier an omelette aux points (Tasperges to a friend 
if she liked. 

“ When I visit my friends I take what they choose to give 
me,” answered Gaston, coldly ; “ but I have no friends in 
tins part of Paris,” 

Suzon Michel looked as black as thunder, and took the 
journalist’s money in sulky silence. She broke a jug before 
dinner-time, and was snappish to her customers all the rest 
of the day. 

“ What Satan-like pride ! ” she exclaimed, thinking of 
her favorite patron ; and then she muttered a remark which 
might have found a place later in the columns of the Fere 
Fuchene. 

She cried when she went to bed that night, cried and 
sobbed, and swore an oath or two by way of solace, before 
she laid her head on her pillow, thiuking tliat Gaston Mor- 
temar would come no more to tnedittle table at the end of 
the shop. But at the usual time he walked into her shop, 
and sat himself down with an imperturbable visage. She 
served his coffee as carefully as ever, but never said a v/ord. 
He read a newspaper while he breakfasted, paid, and went, 
without a word on his part. 

Mext morning there was a bunch of daffodils on the little 
table, a bunch of yellow bloom lighting up the shadowy cor- 
ner. Suzon had trudged to the flower-market before she 
opened her shop, to buy these spring-flowers for the man she 
"loved. Yes, she loved him, and meant to marry him if she 
could. He was a gentleman, and she canaille de canaille. 
But what of that ? Did not the gutter throne it yonder on 
the other side of the Seine, in the Bois, in the Parc Monceau 
—the gutter made glorious in silks and satins, driving thor- 
oughbred horses, scattering their lovers’ substance in 
of gold? Did not all that was noblest in the land lay itself 
down and grovel at the feet of the gutter ? And her gentle- 
man was poor and friendless ; he lived in a garret, and toiled 
for a pittance. Surely he would be willing and glad to marry 


28 


UNDER THE RED FLAG. 


her, when he knew that she had saved money, and had her 
little investments in the public funds. 

He smiled at the first sight of the flowers of spring, and, 
looking up at the widow, saw that she wa^ smiling too. All 
her sullen gloom had melted at sight of him. She was so glad 
he had not forsaken her shop. Pemaps it would have hurt her 
even more than his desertion to have known how insignificant 
a figure she made in his life, and how little he had thought of 
yesterday’s dispute. 

He asKed her the news, and her whole face beamed at the 
sound of his voice. She prattled away gayly for the rest of 
the hour, and considered every other customer an intruder 
while Gaston sat at his little table, 

‘‘You ought to put a placard in your window, with ‘Re- 
lache ’ upon it, Avhen Monsieur is here,” said a grumpy por- 
ter, to whom she had served a pat of butter with scant civility, 
and whose keen eyes saw the state of affairs. 

This kind of thing went on for more than a year. Now 
and again, when Gaston was in luck, and had made a few 
francs more than his ordinary earnings from the newspapers, 
he rewarded the little widow’s attentions by taking her to a 
theatre, and giving her an ice or a supper in the Passage 
Jouffroy before he escorted her home. He treated her en 
grand seigneur on these occasions, and these evenings were 
to Suzon Michel as nights spent in paradise ; hours to dream 
about for weeks after they were gone, to long for with a 
passionate longing. Yet they brought her no nearer to the 
man she loved or to the realization of her hopes. Not a word 
was ever spoken of love or marriage. When they parted on 
the steps of the cremme, while the liells of Notre 'Dame Avere 
chiming one of the quarters after niidiiight, they were as fai* 
apjirt as ever. Tf she Avas ever to l)e Madame Mortemar tha 
otter of marriage must come from her oavu lips, Suzon 
thought ; and she Avould not have shrunk from telling the 
man of her choice of those snug little investments, and her 
willingness to share her economies Avith him. Feminine 
delicacy Avould not have hindered such an avoAval; but there 
Avas something in the man himself Avhich sealed her lips. 

Gaston Avas as cold as ice, as calm as marble. He had tha t 
amiable languor of speech and manner AA^hich clever young 
to affect, until it becomes a second nature. He 
hke a man who had lived through every experience 
that life could offer to reprobate youth, AAdio had groAvn old 
111 1 Time had written a wrinkle on his broAv. 

Ah, but he has liA'^ed, that youth ! ” said the knoAving 
ones of the quarter. “ He has squandered the paternal for- 
tune on actresses and cocottes, and now he has to write for 
his bread.” 

The fact was thak Gaston Mortemar had never had a 
Napoleon to bestoA^ upon anybody, for good or evil. He had 


UNDER THE RED EL AC, 


29 

he left the school of 
Albert the Great, where he had been one of the brightest 
pupils of the good Dominicans. He had never been rich 
enough to be profligate in a grand way ; and he was too proud, 
too refined to stoop to cheap vice. He was, like Alfred de 
Musset, a dandy born,, created with relined tastes and lofty 
aspirations ; but poverty had embittered him. He had fed 
Ins mind with the writings of Villion and Voltaire and 
Ilosseau, Theophile Gautier, Musset, Haiidelaire, and Flau- 
bert. He tried to surpass Voltaire in acrimony, Rousseau 
111 discontept, and lashed himself into fury when he wrote 
about the great ones of the earth. • 

One day he met Kathleen O’Hara in the morning sun- 
shme, coming in from her marketing, just as he was going 
out to breakfast, with a neat gray gown and a pale-blue neck- 
ribbon, and a basket of lettuce and radishes on her arm ; 
and lie thought he saw a Greuze that had suddenly become 
flesh and blood, and had walked out of its frame in the 
Louvre yonder, across the shining river. He forgot his good 
manners, and turned to look after her as she crossed the yard 
and tripped up the steps of that house which he had just left. 
He knew that two girls occupied one half of the third story, 
but they had kept themselves so close that he had only seen 
the elder sister, once in a way, on the staircase. Madame 
Schubert was standing in the doorway, scenting the morn- 
ing air, and watching the goings and comings of her neigh- 
bors. She and Gaston had long been on friendly terms, so 
she gave him a little nod, and laughed as he passed her 
door. 

“ Gentille^ n'est-ce-pas^ mon garco 7 if'’'’ she screamed in 
her shrill treble, with the Boulevard St. Michel twang. 

'\Ge 7 itille! She is adorable,” answered Gaston. “Is it 
possible that such an angel inhabit^ the same dull walls that 
shelter me ? ” 

“ Dangerous is it not ? But she is as good as she is pretty. 
A gentleman’s daughter, too, though she and her sister have 
to work for their bread, poor orphans. The father was an 
Irish captain.” 

“ Irish ! ” exclaimed Gaston, with a touch of surprise. 

He had a vague idea that Irish men and women were a 
kind of savages who inhabited a barren island on the wild 
Atlantic, and ran about half-naked among the rocks. 

“Yes, but these girls have never been in Ireland. They 
were educated in a convent near Bruges. They are young 
ladies, pious, well-conducted, although they work for their 
daily bread. Durand, my neighbor, the young cabinet- 
maker, is over head and ears in love with the elder sister, 
and I think there will be a marriage before long.” 

“ Durand ! What, the sturdy broad-shouldered youth at 


UNDER THE RED FLAG. 


30 

No. 7, who whistles and sings so loud as he goes in and 
out ? ” 

“ Yes ; a fine, frank nature.” 

“Noisy enough, in all conscience,” said Gaston; and he 
went on to get his breakfast. 

He was in no humor for conversation this morning, and 
Suzon Michel’s prattle bored him. He read, or seemed to be 
reading, the Figaro while she was talking — a rudeness which 
galled the widow. 

“ Do you know those two young ladies in the Rue Git le 
Coeur, the house I live in ? ” he asked presently, without 
looking up from his paioer. 

“ Young ladies ! echoed Suzon, contemptuously. “ A 
gentleman may live in the Rue Git le. Coeur, a gentleman 
may live anywhere, that is understood ; but young 
ladies— that is too much ! I know two girls who work 
for the artificial fiower-maker on the Boulevard St. Ger- 
main.” 

“ They are ladies by birth and education, I am told.” 

“ They are stuck-up minxes ; and although that young 
one has come to my shop every day for the last six years she 
does not think me worthy of five minutes’ conversation ; a 
little nod and ‘ J3 on-jour^ madame^ and she’s out of my shop 
as if she thought the place polluted her.” 

“ She is shy, perhaps,” said Gaston. “ I should not think 
she could be proud.” 

Suzon looked at him sharply with those hashing eyes of 
hers — fine eyes, full, black, luminous, but not altogether 
beautiful. 

“ What does 'monsieur know of this young person that he 
is so ready to answer for her ? ” she asked, with a mocking 
air. 

“ Very little. I passed her in the street just now. I 
doubt if I ever saw her till that moment, though we live in 
the same house. Some faces can be read at a glance. In 
hers I saw purity, sweetness, truth, simplicity.” 

“ My faith ! You are skilful at reading faces,” retorted 
Madame Michel ; “ but it is easy to see virtues of that kind 
in a pretty woman. ^ Had Ma’mselle Hara been ugly you 
would not have discovered half these qualities in her 
face.” 

“ They might have been there, perhaps ; but I own I 
should not have looked so keenly. She is the image of a 
Greuze in the Louvre. You know the pictures in the Lou- 
vre ? ” 

“Not much,” said Suzon, with a careless shrug. 

“ Why, you go there nearly every Sunday afternoon.” 

“ True ; but I go to look at the people, not the pictures.” 

Gaston paid for his breakfast, and strolled on to his 


Binder the red flag. 


31 


newspaper-office, thinking, that Suzon ^rew more vulgar 
everyday. He was vexed with himself tor having allowed 
her to establish a kind of friendship with him. She ! the 
keeper of a milk-shop ! 

“ And to think that I come from one of the best families 
in Brittany,” he said to himself. “ Well, I have thrown my 
lot in with the people. I have made myself their advocate ; 
I have asserted the equal rights of man. Ought I to feel 
offended if a milk- woman treats me as her friend ? A hand- 
some woman, too ; bright, agreeable, not without intelli- 
gence, and full of strong feeling. Poor little Suzon ! ” 

Poor little Suzon ! Gaston began to lessen his visits to 
the cremerie. He took a cup of coffee in his garret, and went 
straight to his day’s work. He was too busy to breakfast in 
the old leisurely manner, he told Madame Michel, when she 
reproached him with this falling-off from the old ways. 

“ Have I done anything to offend you ? ” she asked, look- 
ing at him with eyes which took a new beauty, softened by 
sadness. 

“ Offend me, dear Madame Michel ! But assuredly not. 
You are all that is good. But I am working hard just now. 
It does not do for a man to saunter through life, to be always 
a trifler. I have a good deal to do for the paper ; and I spend 
an hour or two every day at the Imperial Library.” 

“ If you are getting a learned man T shall see no more of 
yoUj” sighed the widow. “ You will noP be able to endure 
my Ignorant chatter.” 

“ Gayety of heart is delightful at all times,” said Gas- 
ton. 

“ I begin to think that monsieur must be writing verses, 
he has grown so grave and silent,” remarked Suzon. 

. And then they parted, with ceremonious politeness on his 
side, with keen scrutiny and suspicion on hers. 

Monsieur was not writing verses, but he was living a poem. 
Maman Schubert, the good-natured busybody of the Rue Git 
le Coeur, had planned a little tea-party — the a V Angled se 
— and had invited the two O’Hara ghis — known in their lit- 
let circle as the Demoiselles Hara, since the O was too much 
for a Parisian mouth — and Philip Durand, the cabinet-maker, 
an honest young fellow, a thorough workman and artist, in 
a very artistic trade, and a prominent member of the work- 
rnen’s syndicate — and the cabinet-makers’ syndicate ranks 
high amon^ the societies of French workmen. So far the 
party consisted of old friends, since ^ood Madame Schubert 
had been almost as a mother to the girls whom she had seen 
arrive in the Rue Git le Coeur, dustv and bewildered-looking, 
on the evening of their entry into Paris, and Philip had been 
Rose’s devoted lover for the last three years, haunting her 
like her shadow as she went to and from her work, in the 
early mornings when Paris was being swept and gar- 


lyi^DkR fJtiR RkD PL Ad. 


32 

nished, in the dusky evenings when its million lamps were 
being lighted. Never was there a mo]*e unselfish, a more 
patient, wooer. Rose had been hard with him ; Rose had 
kept him at arm’s-length. She never meant to marry. She 
had her mission in life ; and that mission was to take care of 
Kathleen. 

“ Will you be less able to guard her when you have a 
strong man to help you ? ” asked Philip, “ Do you suppose I 
shall grudge her a room in our lodgings, a place at our table ? 
She will be my sister as much as yours, and as dear to me 
as to you.” 

“ That cannot be. She is more than a sister to me. She 
is the one love and care of my life. Work would lose all its 
sweetness if I did not know 1 was working for her as well as 
for myself. 1 am sure you are good and generous. I dare 
say you would be kind to her ; hut you might grow weary 
of her ; had times might come, and you might think her a 
burden. I will run no risks. I should feel as if I w'ere giv- 
ing her a stepfather.” 

“ And have you made up your mind never to marrv ? ” 

“Never, while Kathleen is single. If she were well mar- 
ried it might be different.” 

“ Then it shall be my business to find her a good hus- 
band,” said Philip. “ With such a pretty girl there can be 
no difficulty.” 

But Philip Durand was a poor hand at match-making. 
While he was thinking about the business, and wondering 
which of the men he rubbed shoulders with at the work- 
men’s chamber was worthy to mate with Rose O’Hare’s 
sister, Madame Schubert, who was an incorrigible schemer 
in the matrimonial line, had brought Kathleen face to face 
with the man whom Fate meant for her husband. 

The fourth guest and only stranger at Madame Schubert’s 
English tea was Gaston Mdrtemar ; and that evening com- 
pleted Kathleen’s conquest. He was her adorer and her 
slave from that hour. It seemed to him as if all life 
took new colors after that evening. The leopard can- 
not change his spots all at once; but the leopard’s ways 
and manners may be considerably influenced ; and although 
Gaston was still Voltairian in his way of thinking, still a 
leveller in politics, he worked more earnestly and more 
honestly than he had ever done before ; for he had assumed 
the responsibility of winning a bright future for Kathleen 
O’Hara. 

The wooing and winning were easily done, for the girl’s 
young heart went out to him as Gretchen’s to Faust. A 
little walk on the bridge in the summer twilight, a flower or 
two— bought in the flower market, but cherished as if it 
were a blossom of supernal growth— a chance meeting in the 
sunny morning, when Kathleen was marketing, and these 


UNDER THE RED FLAG. 


33 

two were pledged to each other for life. But Rose was 
terribly wise. She seemed the very spirit of worldliness, 
and she refused her consent to an imprudent marriage. 
When Gaston had saved a httle money, and could earn, say, 
three napoleons a week— which was less than the skilled 
cabinet-maker earned— Kathleen should be his wife ; not 
sooner. Gaston was earning on an average two napoleons 
weekly, and there was not much margin for saving out of 
that. 

Hitherto he had found himself just able to live, clothe 
himself like a gentleman, and keep out of debt. And to do 
even this he had been thrifty and self-denying. But what 
will not love do ? He became as sparing as Pere Grandet ; 
except when he wanted to offer a httle pleasure, a theatre or 
a cafe chantant., to the sisters. 

Such offers were but rarely accepted. Rose watched 
Kathleen like a lynx, and allowed few tete-a-tetes between 
the lovers. Never was girlish simplicity guarded more 
closely from all peril of pollution. But, once in a way, this 
severe damsel relented so far as to allow the two lovers to 
organize an evening’s dissipation ; audit was on one of these 
occasions, almost immediately after Kathleen’s engagement, 
that Suzon Michel saw Gaston and his sweetheart together 
for the first time. 

It was a sultry August evening, the Seine sliining in the 
golden light of the western sky, the air heavy with heat. 
Durand and Gaston had bought tickets for the side-boxes at 
the Ambigu, where anew play, by Dumas the Younger, was 
l)eing acted, to the delight of all Paris — or, at least, that in- 
ferior and second-rate Paris which had not migrated to 
fashionable watering-places and mountain springs. Kathleen 
and Gaston walked arm in arm along the quay, so engiossed 
in each other as to be quite unconscious of passers-by. Faces 
came and went beside them, voices sounded ; but it was all 
dim as the sounds and faces in a dream. They lived, they 
saw, they heard, they breathed only for each other. 

Close behind them came Rose and her faithful swain : 
and Rose, even in her tenderest moments, was mindful of 
her sister. She was fond and proud of her stalwart, good- 
looking workman-lover, who was so fine a specimen of his 
rank and race, as much a gentleman by nature as Gaston 
Mortemar was a gentleman by hereditary instinct : but she 
was not lifted off this dull earth by her love. 

As they walked towards the Pont Neuf, with their faces 
to the west and the sun shining on them, Suzon Michel met 
them. She saw them* ever so far off : the tall slight figure 
of the man, whose look and bearing she knew so well ; the 
golden-haired girl at his side, radiant and lovely in her plain 
alpaca gown, and neat little black lace bonnet, with clusters 
of violets pestling between the lace and her sunny hair— 


34 


UNDER THE RED EL AG, 


those violets which the auhurn-haired empress loved so 
well. 

Suzan slackened her pace as they di*ew near- her. He 
would recognize her, of course— the false-hearted one ; and 
speak her fair, albeit he had broken her heart by his cold- 
ness and ingratitude. He would stop, the audacious one, 
and brazen out his treachery, and make light of his heart- 
lessness. ' 

But Gaston walked on without seeing her. He passed 
her by, unconscious of her presence, his eyes bent wth im- 
passioned love upon the pure, pale face beside him, his lips 
breathing softest words. Suzon drew aside, and stood upon 
the pavement, looking after them with diabolical hate in 
her face. Rose saw tnat look, and clutched Philip Durand’s 
arm. 

“ Did you see that woman looking after my sister — the 
woman at the cremerie f ” she asked. . 

But Philip had been too much absorbed in his betrothed 
to have eyes for the divers expressions of the passers-by. 
He was full of gladness, thankfulness, for his lot. He had 
been eminently successful as a craftsman, had won a medal 
for a piece of fine workmanship in the Exhibition of 1867 ; 
he was looked upon as a leading light in the syndicate, and 
the dearest woman in the world had promised to be his 
wife. N'ow that Kathleen was engaged there was no more 
difficulty. So soon as Gaston was in a fair way to maintain a 
wife, the two couples would be united. 

The evening at the Ambigu was enchantment ; but both 
girls refused the luxury of ices at Tortoni’s. How were 
lovers to be thrifty if their betrothed were ready to accent 
costly attentions ? Besides, as they passed the famous con- 
fectioner’s, Rose caught sight of a couple of carriages set- 
ting down some ladies and their cavaliers at a side door, 
and those painted faces and rustling silks belonged to a 
world from which I^ose O’Hara recoiled as from a pesti- 
lence. So they all walked home in the August moonlight, 
talking of the play, and were safe in the Rue Git le Coeur 
before midnight. 

Rose did not forget that look of Madame Michel’s. Her 
intense affection for Kathleen made her suspicious of Kath- 
leen’s lover. Such a look as that in a young woman’s face 
could but have one meaning. It meant jealousy ; and there 
could hardly be jealousy without cause. The look suggest- 
ed a history, and Rose set herself to find out that history 
She consulted Madame Schubert, the one friend whom she 
could trust in so delicate a matter, and the good Schubert 
was not long in enlightening her. One does not live in such 
a place as the Rue Git le Coeur for five and twenty years 
without knovdng a good deal about one’s neighbors. 

“ Yes, my dear, there is no doubt this dear Mortemar had 


UNDER THE RED FLAG. 


35 

once a tenderness, for the Michel. He used to breakfast at 
her shop every morning— a leisurely breakfast, during which 
those two talked — ah, great Heaven, how they talked ! one 
could hardly get properly served while he was there, i^d 
he danced with her in the winter at the Bullier balls, and he 
used to take her to the theatre. Friends of mine saw them 
there, as happy as turtle-doves. But what of that ? A man 
must sow his wild oats ; and Gaston is not the less fond of 
your sister because he has played fast and loose with the 
Michel.” 

“ My sister shall not marry a man who has played fast 
and loose with any woman,” said Kose. 

“That is rank nonsense,” answered Maman Schubert. 
“ Mark my word. Rose ; if you try to part those two you will 
break Kathleen’s heart.” 

“Better her heart should be broken so than by a bad 
husband,” said Rose, 

“ He will not make a bad husband. Do you think a man 
is any the worse for a flirtation or two in his bachelor days ? 
That is the way he learns the meaning of real love.” 

Rose was not easily appeased. She saw Gaston next day, 
and taxed him with liis dishonorable conduct to the widow. 
He was indignant at the charge, and declared there had nev- 
er been anything serious between them. She had been at- 
tentive to him as a customer at her cremerie ; he had been 
civil to her— that was all. The visits to the theatre meant 
no more than civility, 

“ There was something more than civility on her part, 
and I think you must have known it,” answered Rose, in- 
tensely in earnest. “If you knew it and fooled her, you 
are not a good and true man : and you shall not marry my 
sister.” 

Gaston protested against this absurd decree ; but Anally 
admitted that he had been to blame. Yes, perhaps he haa 
known that Madame Michel was just a little taken with him, 
inclined to like his society, and to be jealous and angry 
when he deserted her shop. The shop was convenient; 
the woman was handsome and amusing. Why should not a 
man who was heart-whole, who had not one real woman- 
friend in the world, talk and laugh with a pretty shopkeeper ? 
It could do no harm. 

“ It has done harm. I saw as much in Madame Michel’s 
face the other evening.” And then she told Gaston the story 
of that encounter on the quay. 

“Mademoiselle Rose, you exaggerate the situation. The 
Michel has a spice of the devil in her, and can give black 
looks on very slight provocation. For the rest she and I 
have seen the last of each other. I have never crossed the 
threshold since I was betrothed to Kathleen ; I never shall 
cross it again,” 


UNDER THE RED FLAG. 


36 

“ Promise me that,” said Rose. 

“ I promise, from my heart.” 

This happened in the year 1869 ; and now it was midsum- 
mer in the fateful year 1870, and France was treading daily, 
step by step, nearer the edge of the abyss. 


CHAPTER lY. 

THE SONG OF VICTOR Y. 

It was at the beginning of August, just after the victory 
of Saarbruck, and while Piiris was stirred with dreams of 
conquest, and all a-Hutter av ith warlike feeling that the two 
sisters Avere married in the cathedral of Notre Dame, on a 
sunshiny Saturday morning. 

There was no hnery at this wedding, no train of friends. 
Madame Schubert ; a young journalist and playwright who 
wrote for Mortemar’s paper ; a middle-aged gray-bearded 
artist, Avho had painted plaques for some of Durand’s cabi- 
net-Avork — these Avere the only guests. The little procession 
Avalked across the bridge in the morning sunlight, the sisters 
dressed alike in gray cashmere, A^ itli AA'hite bonnets, and 
each Avearing a cluster of Avhite roses at her throat. Nothing 
could be simpler or less costly than this Avedding toilet, yet 
both brides were charming ; neatness, purity, modest con- 
tentment Avith humble fortunes, Avere all expressed in their 
bearing and costume. 

The ceremony Avas to be at ten. They Avere a qiiarter of 
an hour too soon ; and Philip Durand, Avho loved me grand 
old pile Avith the artist’s ardent love of fine artistic Avork, 
walked in the shadoAvy aisles Avith his painter friend, and 
expatiated upon the beauties of the building, Avhile Rose 
wmked by his side, proud of her lover’s learning and enthu- 
siasm. 

Kathleen and Gaston Avaited nearer the altar, the girl 
kneeling with bent head and hidden face, deep in prayer ; 
the lover sitting near, dreamily Avatching the graceful figui-e 
in soft gray drapery, touched with glintings of colored light 
from the old stained AvindoAvs. 

There Avere na other weddings at that 1 'articular hour on 
that particular morning. These two couples and their friends 
had the mightv fane all to themseHes. As the clock struck 
ten the organ began to peal, and the priests came slowly to- 
wards the altar in their rich vestments— for the vestments 
worn upon the humblest occasions at Notre Dame are splen- 
did— and the ceremonial began. 

All was over in less than half an hour, and Kathleen and 
her sister went back into the sunshine, out of the gray 


Under the red flag. 


37 

shadows, the magical lights from painted glass, the glory of 
gold, and splendor of chromatic color. 

“ Is that all ? ” asked Kathleen, looking up at her lover- 
husband. “Am I really and truly your wife?” 

“ Really and truly ; and you would have been just as truly 
my wife if we had never gone further than the mairieP 

“Ko, no, Gaston; for then Heaven would have had no 
part in our marriage.” 

“ My sweetest, I am content that you should be content. 
Women love old-world fancies.” 

There was a stand of carriages in Iront of the church. 
Philip Durand hailed two of them, and the wedding party 
got in. The two bridegrooms had planned the day between 
them. They were to breakfast at the restaurant in the Place 
de la Bourse, chosen for the sake of its winter garden, which 
gave an air of prettiness to the sordid fact of dinner. And 
just now, too, in this time of anxiety and ferment, the Bourse 
was the central point of Paris, where one could always hear 
the latest news. .Just now Paris lived on tiptoe, as it were, 
palpitating, thrilling, with the expectation of great victories 
— an Austerlitz, a Jena : the news might be flashed along the 
wires at any moment oi day or night. The telegraph clerks 
were waiting, Angers itching, to record the triumph of Gallic 
arms. No one thought of Waterloo. 

The bridal party drove across the river, past the Louvre, 
into the Rue de I^ivoli. ¥/hat meant this new life and move- 
ment in the streets — men running to and fro, women standing 
in little groups, laughing, crying, hats waved in the air — the 
wild excitement of a race-course ? 

One would think our happiness had driven all the world 
out of their wits,” said Gaston, with his arm round his wife’s 
slim waist. 

There was only Madame Schubert mth them in the car- 
riage. She had insisted on taking the back seat, and sat 
smiling benignly on the happy lovers. 

The coachman turned round and shouted to them as he 
rattled his horse over the broad space in front of the Theatre 
Francais. The pavement before the cafes was crowded with 
the usual loungers, smoking, talking, drinking; only the 
talk and the laughter was louder than usual, the crowd was 
denser, the air was full of electricity. 

“A victory!” shouted the driver, looking round at his 
fare, and cracking his whip ferociously ; “ a great victory ! 
MaciVIahon has made mince-meat of those Prussian dogs ! ” 

“ A victory, and on our wedding-day ! ” exclaimed Kath- 
leen, joyously ; and then the sweet, sensitive face clouded 
suddenly, and she said ; “ There can be no victory without 
soldiers slain. Many hearts of wives and mothers will be 
mourning to-day amidst all this joyousness. O Gaston, how 


38 


UNDER THE RED FLAG. 


thankful I ought to be that you were past the age for ser- 
vice ! 

“ True, dearest, I am better off here than with the Mo- 
blots ; but if the National Guard were called out I should 
have to shoulder my musket.” 

“ But not to leave Paris,” said Kathleen, nestling closer 
to him ; “ and there can be no fighting in Paris.” 

“Heaven forbid! No, love; one or two victories, and 
Prussia will give us whatever terms we ask. What can a 
herd of Huns and Vandals do against the fine flower of our 
army, the heroes of Magenta and Solferino, the graybeards 
of Alma and Algiers ? ” 

They drove along the Rue Vivienne. The narrow street 
was all in commotion ; ^ople at the shop-doors, people at 
the upper windows ; a Babel of voices, a shrill uproar of 
laughter and exclamation. But in the Place de la Bourse, 
and on the boulevard beyond, the excitement culminated. 
It was the fever of Epsoni when the Derby has just been 
won— the stir and tumult of Doncaster at the crowning mo- 
ment of the Leger ; and yet a deeper and stronger fever, for 
this had the awfulness of life and death. 

Victory, yes ; but where ? Which of the armies was it — 
MacMahon’s or Bazaine’s ? Or was it the two armies which 
had crushed the Prussian forces between them— which had 
met and joined, like two living walls, deadly, invincible, 
squeezing out the life of the enemy ? 

Every one was asking questions, every one answering, 
stating, counter-stating, asserting, denying ; but in this tu- 
mult 01 statement and counter-statement there was a diffi- 
culty in arriving at any positive fact, except the one all-in- 
spirmg fact that there had been a tremendous victory on the 
French side. Flags were flying at all the windows— flags 
produced as if by enchantment : and here came an open 
carriage slowly through the mob— the carriage of a famous 
operarsinger. In an instant it was stopped, surrounded by 
that surging sea of humanity, and the Diva stood up in her 
carriage at the entreaty — nay, almost the command — of the 
public, to sing the “ Marseillaise.” 

The glorious, finely trained voice rolled out the soul-stir- 
ring words, the notes rising bird-like and clear in the summer 
air, floating up to the summer sky ; and then fifty thousand 
voices, the deep, rough tones of an excited populace, burst 
forth in the chorus, like human thunder. Impossible to re- 
sist the magnetism of that passionate patriotism. The eyes 
of strong men grew dim, women sobbed hysterically. France, 
la belle France — she had been in peril perhaps ; yes, strong 
though she was, there was never war without peril ; but she 
was safe— safe, triumphant, glorious, with her foot upon the 
enemy’s neck. Alas, to think how the Gallic cock crew and 
flapped his wings during that one wild hour ! 


UNDER THE RED FLAG, 


39 


The bridal-party pushed their way into the Restaurant 
Champeaux. tinder the glass roof, in the covered flower- 
garden, there was such a mob that it was very difiicult to get 
a small table in a corner, and a waiter who would cease from 
hurrying to and fro to take an order from the newcomers. 
Every one was celebrating the victory with good cheer of 
some kind. Champagne corks were flying, plates clattering, 
spoons and forks jingimg, and everywhere rose the same din 
01 voices. 

Durand and Mortemar contrived, by strenuous exertions, 
to secure a bottle of champagne and another of Bordeaux, a 
poidet gras and a Chauteaubriand, some fruit, cheese, salad ; 
and the wedding-party breakfasted merrily amid the din, 
squeezed together in their corner, stiflingly hot under the 
burning glass roof and in the crowded atmosphere. But 
who would not be happy on a wedding-day, and m the hour 
of victory ? They sat at the little table tor more than an 
hour, nearly half of which time had been wasted in waiting ; 
and when they went out again it seemed to Durand’s keen 
eye as if a change had come over the spirit of the crowd out- 
side. There were only about half the people, and faces were 
graver— some faces of business men looking even perplexed 
and troubled ; voices less loud ; no more hats thrown into 
the air, no more daughter. 

The rest of the bridal party w^ere too much absorbed in 
each other to note the change in the public temper. The car- 
riages were waiting to take them to the Buttes Chaumont, 
where it had been decided to spend the afternoon. They 
were to go back to a dinner, which Madame Schubert and 
Rose had planned between them, in Madame Schubert’s 
apartment, which was spacious and splendid in the eyes of 
the dwellers in Git le Coeur. Durand and Mortemar had 
wished to give a dinner at some popular restaurant— Au Mou- 
lin Rouge, for instance ; but the women had set their faces 
against such extravagance. Rose argued that it was a sin to 
squander money on eating and drinking. She had heard that 
at such places a napoleon was charged for a single dish, a 
franc for a pear or a peach ; yes, when peaches were to be had 
for three or four sous at the street-corners. So Maman Schu- 
bert and Rose had held grave consultations, and had gone 
marketing together on the eve of the wedding : and now, 
while they were driving merrily towards the Place de la Bas- 
tile, the clauhe a la Promncale was simmering slowly on the 
little charcoal stove in la Schubert’s tiny kitchen. i:hQi)etits 
fours from the confectioner’s in the Rue de Bac were 
ready in the doll’s house larder, and the diliner-table was set 
out wdth its fruit and flowers and golden-crusted loaves of 
finest bread, and bottles of innocent Medoc, ready for the 

The excitement of the good news pervaded Paris. The 


UNDER THE RED FLAG. 


40 

Rue St. Antoine, the Place de la Bastile, were alive with 
idlers. They drove by the long, dreary Rue de la Roquette, 
past the prison-walls, away to Menilmontant and Belleville, 
where the honest, harmless working population, the blue 
blouses and white muslin caps, were all astir in the sunshine 
— a seething crowd. There was a kind of fair on the Boule- 
vard, a Saturday and Sunday fair— swings and roundabouts, 
and a juggler or two — all merry in the white August dust, 
under the not blue sky. 

They drove through narrow old streets on the top 01 the 
hill — dusty, crowded, unwholesome, wretched dwellings ; a 
truculent rabble, blue blouses, white nightcaps, everywhere ; 
queer little wine-shops, queer little eating-houses, an nitoler- 
.able odor of hleue and absinthe suisse., a tumult of harsh 
voices, and so to the wonderful gardens, the green valleys 
and Alpine crags, the blue lakes and Swiss summer-houses 
and Grecian temples of the old, old quarries that have been 
made into a pleasure-ground for the people of Paris : surely, 
the prettiest, gayest, most picturesque playground that ever 
a tyrant gave to his slaves. Let us call him a tyrant, now that 
he is asleep in his English grave, and all the good he did for 
the Paris he loved so well is appropriated by new masters, 
his name obliterated from all things which his brain devised 
and his enterprise created. 

The wedding-party drove in by the gate that had admitted 
so many brides and bridegrooms, smart and smiling, in their 
new clothes, their new bliss. They drove a little way into 
the grounds, and then alighted, and climbed one of the Al- 
pine promontories, and looked down u]X)n the gay scene be- 
neath. Never was a more joyous crowd beneath a brighter 
sky, amid a fairer landscape. It seemed as if all Paris was 
taking holiday. The verdant valley was a y>alpitating moss 
of blue blouses, white caps, parti-colored raiment, brightened 
here and there by the uniform of a sergent de mile. One could 
hardly see the greensward, so dense was this muster of hu- 
man beings. The chalets were crowded with customers ; 
lemonade, syrups, coffee, ices. Bavarian beer, were being con- 
sumed wholesale. Mothers and children, fathers, sweet- 
hearts : Paris was all here e^i famille., all elated at the great 
news, somewhat vague at present. But Gaston and his young 
wife went higher and higher, seeking some solitary spot be- 
yond this holiday throng, and at last found a hill upon 
which vegetation was wilder and more romantic, and where 
they were alone for a little while, looking down upon Paris, 
lying in an oval basin at their feet, a city of white houses and 
church-towers, domes and statues, girdled with gardens, 
flashing with fountains, the beautiful river winding through 
the white streets and quays like a broad blue ribbon, touched 
with gleams of gold. 


UNDER THE RED FLAG, 


41 


Is it not a noble city ? ” asked Gaston, proud of his birth- 
place, the only home he had ever known. 

Yonder, to' their left, on the slope of the hill, lay the 
cemetery, crosses and columns, Egyptian sepulchres, Roman 
temples, glittering Vhitely in the sun, amid a tangle of 
summer foliage. 

“ Shall we be there, among the limes, when our life is 
over, I wonder V ” mused Kathleen. Perhaps you will have 
a tomb like Balzac’s or Musset’s. VVdio knows ? ” 

“ Who knows, indeed, dearest? I have been earning my 
bread by my pen for the last ten years, and do not find myself 
any nearer the fame of a Balzac than when I began. Yet 
who knows what I may do now I have you to work for ? 
Balzac had a long time to wait. Fame comes in an hour 
sometimes. And of late, inspired by thoughts of you, I have 
nursed the dim idea of a novel, as I tramped backwards and 
forwards to the office. Yes, I beheve I have a fancy which, 
worked out faithfully, might hit the Parisians. But a jour- 
nalist is the drudge of literature. All his faculties are tlie 
slaves of a tyrannical master, whose name is To-day. ITe 
must think only of the present, write only for the present, 
lie must harbor neither memories of the past nor dreams of 
the future. If Shakespeare and Goethe had written for the 
papers we should have neither “ Faust ” nor “ Hamlet.” 

“ But you will not always have to wprk for the papers ? ” 

“ Who can tell ? I must be at work: early to-morrow^ to 
write a description of that scene on the Bourse for the 
Monday number.” 

“ If I could only help you ! ” sighed Kathleen. 

“ You do help me, dearest. You have helped me to nobler 
ambitions, to purer hopes. You have made me work with 
higher purpose, with steadier aim. You are the good spirit 
of my life.” 

“ Tell me about your story,” she said, “the story you have 
in your mind.” 

“ It is all about love— and you. I will tell you nothing. 
But some day I shall . contrive to write it, between whiles, 
between paragraph and paragraph, leader and leader, and I 
shall get a publisher to produce it, under a nom de plume,, 
and the book shall be the talk of Paris ; and you shall read 
it with smiles and tears, and you shall say, ‘ () Gaston, what 
a painter, what a poet, what an inspired dreamer this man 
must be ! I only wish I knew who he is, that I might worship 
him.’ And I shall say, ‘Worship me, love. I am the ppet 
and the dreamer ; and you are my only Egeria.’ ” 

He looked like a poet, as he lay at her feet on the sun- 
burned sward, his eyes gazing dreamily over the city in the 
valley— dreamily away towards Mount Valerian and the 
fortifications on the other side of Paris. 

They loitered away the long summer afternoon in serenest 


42 


UNDER THE RED FLAG. 


contentment, in deep, inexpressible bliss. It seemed to them 
as if life were henceforward perfect. They had nothing left 
to desire— except, perhaps, on Gaston’s side, fame and wealth, 
ill a remote dream-like future. Kathleen had no desire to be 
rich. Poverty had never hurt her — except in that one sad 
time, when her sister was ill. And now she had a little 
money, put away in a secret placo, against any such evil hour. 
Poverty had no flower of bitterness for this easily satisfied 
nature. She rose as gayly as a lark ; she went about her 
little duties singing for very joyousness. Her humble fare 
w^as sweetened by her contented spirit. Her humble home 
was beautified by all those little arts which endear lowly 
rooms to the dweller. And now, to begin life anew, on the 
same thu-d floor, in the Rue Git le Coeur, with her lover- 
husband, was like the crowning bliss on the last page of a 
fairy tale. 

The streets were very quiet, and had a somewhat gloomy 
look, as the wedding-party drove back to Git le Coeur ; but 
they were all too happy, too much engrossed by their own 
bliss, to remark the change that had come over the aspect of 
the city. Xo more flags, no more cheering, no more songs 
of triumph. 

“ I wonder they did not illuminate some of the public 
buildings,” said JDurand, as they passed the Palais de 
Justice. 

Not a festival lamp twinkled in the August sundown : 
not a star of colored light sparkled on the length of the 
(luays ; not a rocket shot up above the chestnuts in the Gar- 
dens of the Tuileries. Paris wore her everyday aspect. 
However elated the city had been this morning, she was 
taking her triumph soberly to-night. 

The little dinner in the Hue Git le Coeur was a great suc- 
cess. The feast was held in Madame Schubert’s apartment, 
a nd that kindly matron presided at the banquet. Never was 
there a merrier meal ; voices all mingling now and then in a 
joyous tumult of speech — voices low and sweet, deep and 
rei^onant— and ripples of happy laughter ; a frequent clin]^- 
ing of glasses, and anecdotes; and calemhotirs. Gaston’s 
friend, the journalist, turned out a wit of the first water ; 
and the gray-bearded, grave artist proved wonderfully good 
company ; he was loaded with anecdotes, like a six-chambered 
revolver, and before his audience had done laughing at one 
story he had begun another, still funnier, and then another, 
funnier again, a perpetual crescendo of mirth. 

Just as a crowning feature, with the dessert, came a single 
bottle of champagne, whose cork exploded with the force of 
a cannon. 

. “ Listen there ! ” cried the journalist. “How that thun- 

ders ! It is the true wine of war,” 


UNDER THE RED FLAG, 


43 

And, at this, a burst of gayety. It is such a droll thing, 
la guerre, when one’s own country is winning. 

‘Must one little glass more, itue polichinelle^ my friend,” 
said Gaston, lilling his fellow-scribbler’s glass, “ to fete our 
arms.” 

After the champagne, Gaston slipped out quietly, with 
just a whispered explanation to his wife. He had to go 
round to the newspaper office, in the Hue St. Andre, to 
arrange about his descriptive article for Sunday, or, in point 
of fact, to write his paper on the spot. 

He was gone about an hour and a half, and, although the 
anecdotes and calembours went on, and the fun was fast and 
furious all the time, that hour and a half seemed passing 
long to his bride. 

When he came back the gloom of his countenance scared 
the revellers. 

“ Why, Gaston, thou lookest as dolorous as the statue of 
the Commandante ! What ails thee, Trouble-feast?” 

“ It was all a hoax,” cried Mortemar, flinging down his 
hat savagely, “ a trick of that black-hearted devil, Bismarck. 
There has been no French victory-^defeat, if anything. And 
our shouts, our songs, our flags—all madness and folly.” 

“ Oh, but come, now, that is a little too strong on the part 
of ce coquin Bismarck.” 

- “ Yes, it is too strong. He is strong and we are weak- 
weaker than water. A nation that has no prudence, no 
caution, no coolness of brain, can never be a great nation. 
We are cliildren, always ready to take a will-o’-the-Avisp for 
a comet.” 

“We are Celts, my friend, that is all. And we have the 
strength and the weakness of the Celtic nature,” quietly 
answered the gray-bearded painter. “I am afraid these 
slow, square-headed, Saxons will get the better of us. It is 
the old race of the hare and the tortoise over again.” 


CHAPTER Y. 

THE COMING OF THE SQUARE-HEADS. 

No, there had been no victory. The outburst of patriotic 
fervor had wasted itself upon ah idle dream. Paris awoke 
in a very savage humor on Sunday morning : and then Came 
laughter and cynical jests. Everybody accused his neighbor 
of having eagerly swallowed the lie. Everybody declared 
that he, for his own part, had never believed the news so 
greedily accepted by the mob. 

But in those two new homes in the Rue Git le Coeur there 
was bliss, whether the arms of France were victorious or 


44 


UNDER THE RED FLAG, 


otherwise far away in those unknown lands, which the Pa- 
risians were pricking out with pins upon gayly-colored maps, 
sticking up tiny flags here and there on the map to show 
where the French troops were, the very spot where great 
battles might he expected momently, great victories— a new 
Auerstadt, a second Jena. 

What do little birds in their nests on St. Valentine’s Day 
care what battles the big eagles, the hawks, and the vultures 
are flghting far ,av/ay among Scottish mountains, on Alpine 
summits ? The birds have their nests, and each to each is 
the world in little. 

“ Let the world slide, we shall never he younger,” said 
Gaston, who knew Shakespeare, in the translation of Charles 
Hugo. 

He and his young wife were utterly happy. If there were 
dark clouds impending, they could not see tliem. Is not love 
blind— blind to all things except the beloved? The faintest 
shadoAV on Gaston’s brow troubled Kathleen, but not those 
signs of tempest which were gathering round France. 

The new home was full of smiles. Kathleen and Gaston 
had smartened the old furniture by some modest additions, 
bought before their marriage — a writing-table, a cabinet, a 
bookcase filled with Gaston’s books, tlie accumulation of the 
last ten years, a few old mezzotints picked up from time to 
time at the print-shops on the quay. Kathleen and Rose had 
toiled for months to make both homes complete and pretty. 
Curtains and chair-covers were all the work of those two 
pairs of industrious hands. 

Durand, who was richer than Mortemar, had taken the 
lower floor for his own menage. In the Rue Git le Cceur 
that second floor ranked as a rather important suite of 
rooms. 

_ The apartments consisted of salon., fifteen feet by twelve, 
with two casement windows commanding the shabby little 
courtyard; a bedroom somewhat smaller; a little room 
which would serve as a workshop for Durand, who did a 
good deal of artistic cabinet-work on his own account after 
busmess hours ; and a tiny kitchen. Durand’s skilful hands 
had made all the best of the furniture in the dead watches 
of the night, when other men were sleeping or dissipating ; 
so the home of Rose and Philip was furnished in a style 
worthy of a man who stood high in the syndicate of cabinet- 
makers. 

But while his life was so full of happiness for the newly- 
married, the sky was darkening outside. An army of unde- 
niable valor, but in number terribly inferior to the foe, and led 
by generals of scandalous incapacity, was brought face to face 
with the whole of Germany, in arms as one man, burning to 
avenge the agony and shame of sixty years ago. On the^4th 
of August came the defeat of General Douay, beaten and 


UNDER THE RED FLAG 


45 


slain at Wissembourg ; and on the 6th the still more deplor- 
able reverses of MacMahon at Woerth, at Freischwiller, and 
at Reischshoffen. By the breach thus opened the enemy 
poured into France like a torrent. They came, the tetes car- 
rees! There was no longer room for self-deception. This 
was invasion. 

And now far off, dimly, as in a dream, Paris beheld the 
pale spectre of siege and famine. The Parisians knew hard- 
ly anything of the truth, which came to them onB^ in garbled 
fragments. They knew not that upon the heels of these 
three or four hundred thousand men let loose upon France 
would follow hundreds of thousands more ; yes, nearly all - 
the male jwpulation of the old German empire. 

Dark rumors of evil without the walls only drew those 
two households nearer to each other, made home joys sweeter, 
love closer. But now Kathleen learned the meaning of fear. 
She was full of morbid terrors when her husband was away 
from her. She pictured an advance guard of Prussians faih 
ing upon him in the street ; a shell from the enemy’s artillery 
bursting at his feet. And Gaston went every clay to the office 
of the JJrapecm liovge. He had leaders to write, tcirtines, 
letters, patriotic articles breathing Avar-like fire, eyery fnll- 
stop seeming like a shell. France beaten, France invaded? 
Ah, but there was nothing in this world so unlikely, so near 
the impossible; and yet, while he wrote, French aims were 
being flung down, French soldiers werenying—awild rabble 
— from before the face of the foe ; and the invader’s foot was 
on the soil, tramping omvards, steadily, steacUly, steadily, 
gigantic, invincible, like some mighty force of Nature, slow, 
cumulative, pitiless. But say that the soldiers of France hacl 
fled; say that Achilles himself had flung down his swciirl 
and shield, and taken to his heels, whose was the tault . 
Why, naturallv, it w^as the government that was to blame, 
shrieked the Bed Flag. Down wit h_ the ministers ! I et us 
have new ministers, and our arms will be victcirmus. ^lac- 
Mahon and Bazaine, will unite their forces, ancl the tide ot 
Auctory Avill roll backAvard across those advancing heids or 
Huns and Pandours, and sAA’eep the sp^ages back to tneir 
native pine-Avoods, their desert Avastes besicte the Damioe. 

There Avas a vsudden shuffle of cards in the political game. 
Gramont and Ollmer retired, driA^en out by a vote ot ciensuie, 
and General IVfontauban, Conite de 

“ A military Mercadet AAuth a touch of Robert Macape, 
said the Flag. “AVhat good could be expected fre m 

such 'jf 

The month of August wore on— a month ot anxiety, oi 
wavering l^opes, of strengthening feps. History records no 
bloodier battles than Rezonville and Gravelotte, fought in t ae 
micldle of that anxious month ; and although Bazmne claimed 
the first as a victory, he Avas still steadily retreating ; every 


UNDER THE RED FLAG. 


46 

day brought him nearer Metz, where he finally retired, 
abandoning his communications with McMahon and the rest 
of France. 

Then came the rumor that Metz was blockaded : Bazaine 
and his hundred and eighty thousand men were bound round 
with bands of iron, useless, helpless. MacMahon was en- 
camped at Chalons, re-creating his army, and thither regi- 
ment after regiment of midisciplined youth was sent to him; 
and undisciplined youth made the country round ring with 
the noise of its follies, made France blush for her sons. And 
still the flood of invasion rolled on, steadily as the rising 
tide ; a week, a fortnight at most, and the Crown Prince with 
his victorious army would debouch upon the plain of Gene- 
villiers. And now, in earnest this time, seeing the enemy 
so near, Paris awakened to the possibility of a siege ; but 
even yet fear was not so serious as to stimulate the city to 
prompt and earnest action. The people waited— expectant, 
hopeful still ; something would happen, something unfore- 
seen— a miracle, perhaps. 

Something unforeseen did happen ; but the unforeseen 
wore the shape of shame, defeat, humiliation— an empire 
overthrown in one bloody day ; Emperor a state prisoner, 
Empress a fugitive, army prisoners of war. 

First came the tidings that MacMahon, instead of trying 
to block the passage of the Germans, instead of falling back 
upon the capital to fight one of the world’s decisive battles 
under the walls of Paris, was moving northwards, obviously 
intent upon joining and releasing Bazaine. 

What might not be hoped from a coalition between two 
such generals— one who had risen with every defeat, the 
other as famous for indomitable energy as for military skill? 
What might not be hoped for from Bazaine’s hundred and 
eighty thousand men, the flower of the French army ? 

For two days, the first balmy days of September, a restless, 
feverish, over-excited populace lived upon the boulevards 
and in the streets *, questions, statements, counter-statements 
flew from lip to lip, while false reports and monstrous exag- 
gerations were in the very air men breathed. Then, on a 
Saturday night, came the news of a great calamity; a terri- 
ble battle had been fought, was still being fought, with 
fluctuating fortunes, in ^ the environs of Sedan. But the 
ultimate result? For this Paris waited with inexpressible 
agitation. The news-venders’ kiosks were besieged by 
tumultuous crowds ; hands were stretched forth, tremulous 
with excitement, clutching at the papers ; men stood upon 
the boulevard benches, reading the news aloud, above a sea 
of heads. 

Nothing was certain in the news thus devoured, nothing 
precise. The crowd, deprived of official information, was 
consumed by a nervous irritability, a fever of hopes and 


UNDER THE RED FLAG, 


47 

fears. Men were impatient, captious, quarrelsome. At the 
first word of doubt they were ready to treat each other as 
Prussians or traitors ; for a mere nothing they would have 
challenged each other to mortal combat. Voices were sharp, 
strangers glared at one another with angry e yes. 

Lamps began to shimmer in the summer twilight, cafes 
and wines-shops shone out upon the night, and gradually, 
imperceptibly, the knowledge of a great catastrophe spread 
and circulated on every side. Details were wanting ; but 
France had suffered some terrible defeat. That was seen 
in every face. No one in Paris slept that night. The Corps 
Legislatif called a midnight sitting ; and the Empire sank 
through the stage of this world to the realm of chaos and 
night, evanescent as a scene hi a fairy play ; and the curtain 
rose upon the Republic. 

The next day was Sunday, September the 4th, and the 
new-born republic began in tne glory of a cloudless summer 
sky. Oh, strange people, children of smiles and tears ! Last 
night Paris had been plunged to the bottom of a black 
abyss, steeped in the horror of calamity, brought face to face 
with the certainty of an imminent siege, her army annihi- 
lated, her empire fallen. Paris had laid herself down in 
dust and ashes, with weeping and wailing for the splendor 
that had perished, the glory that was gone. 

To-day, Sunday, and a holiday, Paris awoke radiant. 
Again the excited populace filled the boulevards, poured 
along the streets, a strong current of humanity trending 
towards the Champs Elysees and the Bois. But to^ay the 
note is changed. It is no longer the harsh minor of ^cl^l s 
wail for her lost sons, but the glad psalm of Deborah. The 
Empire has fallen, has fallen ! Long live the Republic ! Let 
them come, the tetes carrees / We are more than a match 
for them nou\ Joy beams on every face. The crowd wears 
its holiday clothes, its holiday aspect. , 

Every now and then a battalion of the National Guard 
tramps singing along the roadway. They stop their song to 
cry, Long live the Republic ! ” and thunderous accla- 
mations reply, “ Long live the Republic ! ” 

And now came a time of preparation, expectation anti- 
cipation. The days of uncertainty were over, and W illiam 
and his conquering hosts were pouring steadily 
this beautiful city of Paris. Bismarck had avowed that he 
bore no grudge against France : he made war only upon the 
emjjire. And lo, the empire was ended like a morning 
dream, the eagles were draggled in the blood-stained dust oi 
disastrous battle-fields : and still Germany pressed onw^d, 
laughing with a sardonic laughter at the impediments that 
France set in her way. Here a bridge blown to the i(mr 
winds, there a viaduct shattered, railway-lines ^t, ae- 
struction everywhere ; and yet the barbarous hordes tramped 


48 


UNDER THE RED FLAG. 


on over the ruins that strewed the way, pouring, pouring, 
^unng onw^ard, like the army of locusts in Holy 

The Parisians expected an assault, a great battle, victory 
or speedy di^om. They waited boldly, strong in their faith 
that HellOna was on their side. The goddess of battle had 
hidden her face from them hitherto, but it must be that she 
loved her France, laurel-crowned victrix of so many glorious 
fields, mother of heroes. 

Yet, although expectant of short and sharp strife, Paris 
prudently prepared against the hazard of a blockade. She 
gathered m her flocks and herds, she heaped up corn and 
coal. The Grand Opera, that palatial pile which was to 
have been a crowning glory of the empire, was converted 
into a storehouse, half reservoir, half gran^iry. She set to 
work to complete her unfinished fortifications, but passing 
slowly. She armed all her citizens. Chassepots and Rem- 
ingtons were your only wear. And honest shonkeepers, 
who had never pulled a trigger, swaggered and structed in 
warlike gear. Every head wore the ,* every man told 
himseli that, come what might, let trade or family perish, he 
mustbe on the walls ready to receive Wmiarn and 

his pandours. With some there was an idea that those ad- 
yaiming hordes were fresh from their native pine-forests, 
halt-naked savages, with long hair, and wolf-skins slung 
am'oss their brawny shoulders— such men as destroyed 
Varus and his legions— such men as fcught and died for 
Vercmgetorix. 

p. ^ome,’’ said the sleek grocers and bakers of 

getting ready for them.” 

fUn 1 ® cut down her wood, her beautiful Bois de Boulogne 
the happy holiday ground of high and low. Those leafy ar- 
cades were given over to the woodman’s axe thosp 

^ke the^fatmf swans upon the silvery 

thp nf +hp groves, were abandoned to 

Moblots. Everywhere the creak and crash 
of falling timber, the scream of dying beast or bird. There 
procession of carriages used to circulate in 
fWo oT sunlight, were now loneliness and ruin; hei4 
and there a few scattered plumes, white on the greensward 
been ; here and there the thiclc 
black smoke and fitful flame marked a newly fired thicket 

^ campj and every citizen a soldier. But the 
Thprp^Ll.^^<r i^either onerous nor varied at this period. 
There was the morinng rendezvous from seven to eight the 
lay and night watch on the ramparts, short slumbers under 

wTre not°yet^bu1fr“'’*^ 

randTn”/ National Guard, Philip Du- 

rana and Gaston Mortemar were both numbered. ^ The 


UNDER THE RED EL AG. 


49 

charmed life of the newly wedded was over. The domestic 
hearth was lonely. The husband could only return to his 
home in the intervals of his service as a defender of his city* 
And his wife was full of fear in her lonely home, or prowliiig 
in the neighboring streets on some small household errand, 
loitering with other wives on doorsteps or at street-corners, 
devouring the last news from the ramparts. Trade was at a 
standstill. Each National Guard had his allowance of a 
franc and a half a day, with a small sum for wife or family ; 
but it was almost impossible for him to carry on any handi* 
craft during this reign of chassepot and Ivemington. Some 
there were, the few — the elect among workers— who com 
trived to accomplish something in their brief respite from sol- 
diering ; and among these was Durand. His employer had 
shut U.P his factory. What good was there in creating arti- 
cles of luxury— artistic cabinets a la Renaissance, writing- 
tables a la Dubarry, commodes a la Maintenon. what use m 
imitating the finest works of Buhl and Reismer, when the 
city was girt with iron, and might, ere long, be girt with 
fire ? when at any evil hour, as yet unmarkea upon the cal- 
endar, a bomb might explode in the middle of the factory, 
and send Buhl and Reisner, delicate inlaid-work, ormolu 
and cherry-wood, pear-tree and ebony, in a shower of splin- 
ters through the shattered roof? The proprietor stowed 
away his choicest woods in his cellars, and locked up his 
warehouses and workshops. No goods could be exported 
from a blockaded city ; and in the city there were no pur- 
chasers of art furniture. 

But this did not constrain Durand to lay aside his gouges 
and chisels. Before his marriage he had brought home to 
his little workshop some fine pieces of old wood collected in 
various nooks and corners of Paris — an oak panel from the 
wreckage of a church, an old walnut sideboard, thick, heavy, 
clumsy, but oh, so well seasoned and richly colored, from a 
sixteenth-century house in the Marais — and with treasures 
such as these to hand Philip Durand had no lack of work. 
He had undertaken a magmtm opits in the shape of a side- 
board, which, in design and workmanship, was to surpass 
anything that had yet been done in the factory where he 
was chief workman.’ All his knowledge of the niasterpieces 
in carved oak, all his taste and skill, were brought to bear 
upon this piece of furniture. His long Sunday afternoons . 
in the Louvre, his study of the art-books in the Imperial Li- * 
brary, all helped him in his handicraft. Jacques Mollin, his 
friend, the painter, was at his elbow to make suggestions 
while the drawings for the sideboard were in progress. The 
mighty dead had their part in the work. This tangle of 
fruit and flowers on the cornice owed something to Van 
Huysum. This heap of wild-fowl and hares, flung as it were 
haphazard against a lower panel, was a souvenir of Snyders, 


UNDER THE RED FLAG, 


SO 

Everywhere the mind of the artist informed the hand of the 
craftsman. And the sideboard was as the apple of Philip 
Durand’s eye. It was sure to bring him money, which he 
cared for only for the sake of his wife and liis home; it 
might bring him fame, which he valued for his own sake, 
and still more for Rose, who would be proud by and by to 
say, “ I did not marry a common workman.” 

She was a gentleman’s daughter, the daughter of an 
officer in the Enaiish army, a man of good birth and refined 
surroundings. Tliis man of the people never ignored that fact 
when he thought of his wife. He wanted to atone to her for 
the sacrifice she had made ; he never thought of her as the 
grisette, earning her living by the labor of her hands ; but as 
Captain O’Hara’s daughter, born and bred as a lady, stoop- 
ing from her high estate to become a mechanic’s wife. 

How h^ppy were those brief glimpses of home, those brief 
hours with gouge and chisel, beside the hearth, while Rose 
stood by and watched the slow, careful work — the chiselling 
of a feather, the rounding of a peach, the minute touches 
that marked the scales of a fish ! 

Yes, even while fear and uncertainty ruled without, 
while earnings were nil^ and the strictest economj^ was 
needed lest these days of scarcity should exhaust the little 
capital' amassed with such miracles of prudence and self- 
denial: even now, with the enemy within sight of the walls, 
with the future of France wrapped in gloom, there was glad- 
ness in this humble home on tlie second fioor in the Rue Git 
le Coeur, and the little dinner or supper of bread and salad, 
the morsel of Lyons sausage, or the wine-soup, was as a feast 
at this board, where Love ever sat as the chief guest, smil- 
ing, blind to misfortune, careless of days to come. 

Above-stairs, in the journalist’s home. Love also reigned, 
and here, too, was the deei) happiness of perfect union ; but 
with Gaston and Kathleen life was less calm than in the 
Durand household. Gaston was steeped to the lips in the 
fever of politics, was blown hither and thither, his soul 
tossed and agitated by every breath of the public whirlwind. 
He had friends here, there, and everywhere among the ex- 
treme Republican party ; he believed in Rochefort, he wor- 
shipped Flourens, that hot-headed enthusiast, who just at 
this time was in command of five hattalions of the National 
Guard, the beloved of Belleville and Menilmontant, a leader 
at whose beat of drum that seething iDopulace were ready to 
lise as one man. 

The lied Flag was loud in its reproaches against existing 
authorities. The Red Flag lauded Blanqui and the Blan- 
Qiiists, and was just now at the height of popularity,rivalling 
l^lix Pyat s paper, Le Combat^ and Blanqui’s Fatrie en 
Fanger ; and yet the day was to come when the Fatrie en 
Ihmger Cease to charm, and the Red Flag would not 


Under the red flag. 


51 

be half red enough— would perish as an effete rag, too tame, 
too soft, for the age of anarchy and death. The day was to 
come when every color would be too pale for Paris, save the 
deep dark hue of blood. 

But at this time I*aris had not yet begun to suppress its 
newspapers. The Red Flag was popular, and Gaston Mor- 
temar was the most popular among its contributors. He 
w^as paid liberally for his work ; for, in this day of doubt and 
uncertainty, the poorest could spare a couple of sous for a 
paper that told how France was being misgoverned, and 
called upon the supreme sovereign people— the Mirabeaus 
and Hobespierres and Dantons and Marats of Menilmon- 
tant — to rise in their might, and steer the tempest-driven 
ship to a safe harbor— the smooth roadstead of Communism, 
Collectivism, Karl Marxism, what you will ; every man his 
own master, no hereditary nobility, no land owners, no mil- 
lionnaires, a universal level of blue blouses and cheap 
wines. 

And as weeks and months wore on, and autumn began to 
have a wintry aspect, and party rose against party, faction 
against faction, and agitation and fever w^ere in the very air 
men breathed, Kathleen’s breast was fluttered by many fears. 
In Gaston’s absence she was never free from nervous appre- 
hensions, from morbid imaginations. It was only in those 
brief intervals when he was at home, sitting at his desk, 
writing passionate, vehement protests against this or that, 
prophecies of evil, wild suggestions for wilder action, bend- 
ing over his paper with pale, nervous face and flashing eyes, 
dipping his pen into the ink as if it were a stiletto stuck in 
the heart of the foe, w riting as if Satan himself guided his 
pen, or snatching some hurried meal w'hile the printer’s devil 
ran off with the copy, to return an hour after with the proof 
— it w^as only then, when he was there., and she could stand 
beside him as he wrote, and twdne her arms round his neck, 
or smooth his disordered hair, stooping noAv and tlien to kiss 
the troubled brow, that Kathleen felt her husband w^as safe. 
At all other times she thought of him as a mark for Prussian 
bullets or for private vengeance. She had visions of every 
kind of catastrophe that might befall him. 

“ Oh, how I pity the poor rich wives, the great ladies of 
Paris ! ” she said to Gaston one day, at she sat on his knee 
after their scanty meal, brushing back the rumpled hair fiom 
his forehead with two loving hands, looking down into the 
dark eyes which gave back her look of love ; “ how I pity 
them, poor things, sent away to Dieppe or to Etretat, to Ar- 
cachon or Trouville, parted from their husbands, languishing 
yonder in fear and trembling ! Don’t you think it was cruel 
of the husbands to send them away, Gaston ?” 

“ Ko, dearest ; unselfish rather than cruel. The women 
and children have been sent away from scarcity and danger. 


UNDER THE RED FLAG. 


52 

from trouble and fear. T wish you had let me send vou to 
your old friends at the convent near Bruges, whose charitv 
would have forgiven your flight, and who might have shel- 
tered you in peace and security till this tempest should be 
overmst.” 

“ reace and security away from you ? I should have bro 
ken my heart in a week. Vou could never have been cruel 
enough to send me away ! ” 

“ Do you suppose I would not rather have you here, pet ? ” 
he asked, looking up at her, drawing down the pale, fair face 
to meet his own, and covering it with kisses ; the light of 
my home, the guardian angel of my life. The brief half-hours 
that we can spend together thus and thus and thus,” with a 
kiss after each word, “are better than a year of commonplace 
comfort ; our meal of bread and haricots is better than a din- 
ner at Bignon’s in the golden days of the empire that is dead, 
when dining ranked among the fine arts. Did you read my 
last article in the iJrapean.^ Kathleen ? ” he asked in conclu- 
sion, with a little look which betrayed the vanity of the suc- 
cessful journalists— the man who believes that he moulds and 
makes public opinion. 

“ Did 1 read it? ” cried Kathleen ; “ why 1 read every word 
you write ! There is no ope so eloquent, no one else whose 
prose is so full of poetry— except, perha])s, Victor Hugo— but 
I like your style better tlian his,” she added, quickl}^ lest he 
should be offended ; “ only, Gaston, sometimes as 1 read I 
fear that you are not wise, that those grand, glowing word^ 
of yours— words that burn like vitrol sometimes— may fire a 
train which will lead to an explosion— an explosion in Avhich 
Ave may all perish. Think of all those people at Bellevilie 
and JMenilmontant and Montmatre and Clignancourt— many 
and many of them honest, industrious souls, desiring only 
right and justice, but others steeped in crime, misery^ hatred 
—a seething mass, fermenting in the corruption of idleness 
and sin — ready to arise like a poison cloud, and spread death 
and ruin over the city. Do you remember last Sunday, Avhen 
we Aveiit for a long Avalk in those streets beyond the Boule- 
vard Richard Lenoir ? There Avere faces in the croAvd, Gas- 
ton, that made me shudder, that made me cold with horror ; 
faces of Avomen as well as of men — yes, I think the Avomen 
were Avorse— faces Avhich haunted me afterAvai’ds.” 

“ There are blouses and blouses, Kathleen,” said Gaston, 
smiling at her earnestness. “ You cannot expect that men 
and AVomen Avho have toiled and grovelled for tAA^o thirds of 
a lifetime in semi-starvation— Avho hjtve seen all the splen- 
dors and pleasures and comforts of this world pass by, afar 
in the distance, no more to them than pictures in a magic- 
lantern— you can hardly expect that kind of clay to dress it- 
self 111 ) in smiles on a Sunday afternoon, and to sing hymns 
of thankfulness to the Creator.” 


V^DER THE RED EL AG. 


53 


“ I should not have been surprised that they looked discon- 
tented^” said Kathleen, “ but they all looked so wicked.” 

“Discontent and wickedness are very near akin” an- 
swered her husband. “ When there is work for all, and food 
for all, you will see very few of those wicked faces. I am 
one of the apostles of the religion of Collectivism, and when 
that is the creed of France there shall be no more starvation, 
no more discontent, no great masses of wealth locked up in 
foreign loans or distant railways ; no millionnaires’ palaces, 
with a million or so sunk in pictures and bric-Orbrac ; but 
the money won by the laborer shall be in the pocket of the 
laborer, and there shall be no such thing as stagnant capi- 
tal. We have seen enough of Dives, in his purple and fine 
linen, Kathleen ; it is time that Lazarus should have his 
turn. Dives means the individual; Lazarus means thq 
nation.” 

“ But if, when the Prussians have gone, you are going to 
do away with millionnaires, who is to buy Philip’s side- 
board ? ” demanded Kathleen, perceiving that this paradise 
of Collectivism was not without its inconveniences. ^ 

“No one,” answered Gaston, lightly. “ Philip is a fool 
to create such a white elephant. The age of personal luxury, 
pomp, and show, and wild expenditure was an outcome of 
the empire; it meant rottenness and corruption, bribery, 
falsehood, debauchery, an age of courtiers and cocodettes^ 
stock-jobbers and card-sharpers. In the age that is coming 
there will be no carved oak sideboards, worth twenty thous- 
and francs, no Gobelins tapestries, no Sevres porcelain. 
There will be a bit of beef in every man’s pot-aii-feu^ a roof 
over every man’s head, food and shelter, light and air, and 
cleanliness and comfort, and a free education for all.” 

“ And it is towards this all your articles in the Drapeau 
tend ? ” asked Kathleen, naively. 

“ To this, and to this only.” 

“ I am so glad. I was afraid sometimes that you were 
urging the people to act as they acted in ’93, when king and 
queen, patriots and priests, and helpless innocent people 
weltered in their blood, yonder, on the Place de la Concorde.” 

“ My dearest, I preach communism, not revolution,” an 
swereci Gaston, all in good faith. “We have no princes to 
slay. We have got rid of Badinguet and all that canaille \ 
we have a clear stage and no favor ; and it will be our own 
fault if France does not rise regenerated, purified, chastened 
^by her misfortune, a veritable Phoenix, from the ashes of 
ruined town and villages, from the dry bones of a slaughtered 
army.” 

“And there will be nobody to buy poor Philip’s side- 
board,” concluded Kathleen sorrowfully, full of regret for 
the enthusiast in the little workshop below stairs. 

It seemed to Kathleen as if a world, in which there were 


54 UNDER THE RED FLAG, 

no rich people to buy works of art, no beautiful women clad 
in satin andvelvet, no splendid carriages drawn by thorough- 
bred horses, no palace windows shining across the dusk 
with the yelloAV light' of myriad wax candles, no gardens 
seen by fitful glimpses athwart shrubbery and iron railing, 
would be rather a dreary world to live in, albeit there was 
bread for all, and a kind of holy poverty, as of some severe 
monastic order, reigning everywere. 


CHAPTER yi. 

ON THE RAMPARTS. 

Paris was a camp ; but^ so far, it was but playing at sol- 
diers, after all, for those within the walls ; though there was 
plenty of hard fighting outside ; and many a woimded Mo- 
biot was carried to the ambulance on a litter, never to leave 
it alive ; and many a mother’s heart was tortured with fear 
for her sons ; and many a Rachel wept for those that were 
not. But though the roar of cannon thundered, or grumbled 
sullen and dully in the distance, the National Guard within 
the walls had what their American friends called a good 
time. The watch upon the ramparts was the most onerous 
duty, and it was only the night-watch— the cold shelter of a 
tent, where the sentinel, returning from duty, generally 
found an intruder snoring upon his own particular knap- 
sack, and under his o\yn particular rug— which the honest 
citizen-soldier found in somewise hardship. For Gaston 
Mortemar, young, vigorous, full of enthusiasm, reddy, like 
Flourens, to lead five battalions to the fray, if need were, the 
cold nights of October and the canvas quarters were as noth- 
ing. His mind was charged with enthusiasm as with elec- 
tricity. That bitter defeat, that day of humiliation yonder, 
on the Belgian frontier, seemed to him the iustice of the 
gods, the salvation of France. The Man of December and 
Sedan — it was thus Blanquists and Internationals spoke of 
the late emperor— was dethroned. That empire of dinqxtan t 
';md jiouerie^ had crumbled into dust, V Tnfame fiit ecrase.^ and 
France was free to achieve her glorious destiny, as the liber- 
ator of the_ world, and to establish the millennium of com- 
munism, the ueaceful reign of blouses, blue and white, the 
apotheosis of Belleville and Menilmontant 

In many a fervid speech Gaston depicted the glories of 
that coming age, yonder, at the club of the Folies Bergeres, 
at two steps from the Boulevard IMontihartre, where the 
talk ranged ever from grave to gay, from the passionate ora^ 
tory of the fanatic to the lowest deep of hlague and buff oonry. 
There, and m the Salle Favre, and in many other such 


UNDER THE RED FLAG. 


55 


E laces, Gaston preached his gospel of free labor, every man 
is own master, every workman his own capitalist, no cop- 
centration of profits, no man permitted to grow rich by the 
sweat of another man’s brow. 

‘‘ The civilized world has outlived black slavery,” he cried ; 

“ but so long as we still have white slavery — the slavery of 
the journeyman under the heel of the capitalist— there is no 
meaning in the word civilization ; there is no such thing on • 
earth as justice.” 

He paced the ramparts, chassepot in hand, full of such 
thoughts, ready to repulse the Prussians, who had not the 
least idea of attacking bastion or curtain while the gradual 
work of exhaustion was going on within the charmed circle ; 
and it was only a question of so many months, so many 
weeks, so many days, when star^dng Paris must surrender. 
Already there had been talk of an armistice, and already 
that heroic cry of Jules Havre, hurled like a gauntlet in the 
teeth of the enemy, IsTot an inch of our territory, not a stone 
of our fortresses,” sounded bitterest mockery. 

Gaston’s belief in the power of France against Germany 
was growing feebler every day ; but the faith in the great 
French iieople, as represented by the blouses of Paris, and 
in the Commune, as the perfection of government, grew day 
by day. Were not the people showing every hour of what 
noble stuff they were made ? See how steadily they faced 
the terrors of a beleaguered city, the deprivations of a state 
of siege. Behold their courage, their patience, their gay 
good temper. Drunk occasionally perhaps ; but in mere ex- 
uberance of an enthusiastic temperament. See how little 
the knife had been used in these occasioiifd brawls — a covp 
de savate^ a nose tweaked here and there, sufficed. The 
people showed themselves a nation of heroes, . 

It did not occur to Gaston Mortem a r that Belleville and 
Menilmontant, Clignancourt and Montmartre, were getting 
a good time ; that it was as if Bermondsey and Bethnal 
Green, Whitechapel and Clerkenwell, were having a umvei- 
sal holiday, while every man got fifteenpence a day, and an 
allowance for his family, for doing nothing. At every streco 
om'iier there was a cluster of the National Guard, clrinKing, 
tmghing, orating, playing the game of hovchon*'dp. innocent 
little game of chance with the corks of their wine-bottles ; 
cvervwhere, even on the boulevards, dim with the haii-ligiit 
of alternate lamps, there were sounds of laughter and gayety ; 
v/hile day by day came tidings of some skirmish outside tiie 
walls, which had ended disastrously for those poor Mo blots, 
who had a knack of ruiming away helter-skelter when they 
found themselves the focus of a circle of artillery. 

It was early in October, and as yet there was no actual 
scarcity of food. Hardship and famine, the bitter, cold ot 
printer, were yet in the future. Luxuries were things to be 


56 UNDER THE RED FLAG. 

remembered in the dreams of the epicure or the sensualist ; 
but frugal Spartan fare was within reach of all who had a 
little money in the stocking, who had kept their poire pour 
' la soif. The little children were not yet pining, sickening, 
fading off the earth for lack of a cup of milk, and the crenierie 
in the street round the corner was in full swing. 

Suzon Michel’s cremerie was something more than a 
cremerie in these days. It was almost a club. Communists, 
internationalists, collectivists, had their rendezvous in the 
little shop where Gaston Mortemar used to eat his breakfast 
in days gone by. The more temperate and respectable of 
the revolutionary party loved to assemble here. The fare 
was frugal, but mere was a debauch of oratory ; and, in the 
midst of all the talk, the gesticulations, the prophecies, the 
threatenings and denunciations^ Suzon was as tlie Goddess 
of Liberty, the Muse of Revolution, the Egeria of the gutter. 
She had read of Theroigne de Mericourt, of Mada me Roland, 
and she fancied herself somethiiig' between the two. She 
talked as boldly, as loudly, as the loudest of her customers. 
She felt that sue could mount the scaffold and lay her neck 
under the fatal knife without flinching. 

Never had she looked handsomer than in these days of 
fever and commotion. Sometimes she twisted a scarlet 
handkerchief round her raven hair, and those black eyes of 
hers flashed and danced and sparkled under the Phrygian 
cap of Liberty. Her neat lilack gown fitted her sceltc hgure 
t ) perfection. Her energy, her vivacity, her industi-y were 
inexhaustible. Her hands were as the hands of Br'iareus, 
tor serving the patriots with their coffee, their rolls and 
butter, fler gay voice sounded above the other voices in the 
melee of wit and patriotism. She sang as she went to and 
fro among the little tables, waiting upon her patrons ; and 
her song was always the newest ballad with which the 
balladmongers were undermining the government, the 
“ Lillibullero ” of the hour. 


“ Je sais le plan cle Trochu, 
Plan plan, plan, plan, plan ! 


Sometimes, ^ a moment of exaltation, her customers would 
call fora stave of the “ Marsellaise ” or -he^Ca ira,” and 
then the clink of cups and saucers and knives and forks 
upon the tables was like the clash of swords. 

Blit, tenipting as these morning a ssemblies of the patriotic 
and the idle might be to a man of Gaston’s temperament, he 
never crossed the threshold of Suzon MichePs shop. He 
passed her door twice a day, or oftener, on his way to and 
from the newspaper offiee ; he heard the chorus of voices in- 
side, but he never eptered the shop. He had a feeling that 
loyalty to Kathleen forbade him to hold any commune with 


UNDER THE RED FLAG. 


31 

Suzon. And what need had he to take his cup of coffee from 
a shopkeeper’s hand when the faithful wife was waiting for 
him 111 her bower on the third story, Avatching the little 
brass coffee-pot simmering upon a handful of charcoal ? One 
could not be too sparing of lire in these days, though one 
were ever so sure that tlie Prussians must retire from the 
enemy’s soil before winter began in real earnest. The 
elements Avould fight upon the side of the besieged. That 
vast army, shivering yonder under canvas, must beat a re- 
treat at double-quick time before Jack Frost. 

It was on one of the clear gray afternoons of October that 
Gaston stood resting upon his gun, at his post on the rampart 
of the fort, gazing with dreamy eyes upon a landscape of 
poetic beauty, the deep rich coloring of autumn subdued into 
perfect harmony by the tender mists which shadowed, with- 
out concealmg, wood and river, vineyard and field, while far 
off in the dimness of the horizon his fancy conjured up the 
dark SAvarm of Prussian helmets, blackening the edge of the 
landscape. The atmosphere Avas full of peace, and the silence 
of this lonely outpost Avas broken only by the qui vive of the 
sentries and the chimes of distant church clocks. A good 
place for a poet to brood upon the creations of his fancy, or 
lor a journalist to hatch a leading article. 

While Gaston stood at ease, Avith his -eyes wandering far 
afield toAvards the distant foe, and his fancies straying still 
farther in a day-dream of universal peace, liberty, art for 
art’s sake, and all the impossibilities of the socialist’s Utopia, 
a sound of strident laughtei\ of deep bass voices and nasal 
trebles, broke like a volley of musketry through the stillness 
of the soft gr^ atmosphere, and presently half a dozen kepU^ 
or National Guard, considerably the AA^orse for le petit bleu., 
came SAvaggering along the rampart, escorting a young avo- 
man, Avhose scarlet headgear shone in the distance like a spot 
of flame. 

It was Madame Michel, Avith the little red kerchief tAvisted 
coquettishly round her sleek black hair. She wore a tight 
cloth jacket, frogged a la ivilitaire^ over her black gOAvn, the 
skirt of Avhich Avas short enough to shoAv an arched instep 
and a neat ankle. She had put on a half virile, half soldierly 
air, in honor of the times ; and her talk, her look, her mamier, 
were already prophetic of the coming petroleuse. 

She came along the rampart Avithher patriots. Avho were 
pomting out the merits and faults of the fortifications, ex- 
plaining, showing her this and that, sAvaggering, bragging, 
abusing Bismarck and his Pandours, singing snatches of pa- 
triotic verse. She Avas close to Gaston before she recognized 
him. 

Then their eyes met, suddenly, his returning from the 
far distai^ce, hers staring intently. Recognition came in a 


UNDER THE RED FLAG, 


5 ^ 

flash, and the rich carnation of her cheek faded to an almost 
deadly pallor. 

“ What, is it you, Citoyen Mortemar. so far from the line 
Git le Cceur ? AVhat, are you too in trie National Guard ? 
I thought so devoted a husband would have found an excuse 
from service. I thought you would be lying at the feet of 
your English-Irish wife all day, like Paul and Virginia in 
their far-off island.” 

“ The nation cannot spare even lovers,” answered Gaston, 
lightly. “ Hector liad to leave Andromache ; and my Andro- 
mache would despise a husband who did less than his duty. 
So far our duties have been light enough, and give no ground 
for boasting.” 

“But let them come on, those Uhlans, those gredins^ 
those—” here came a string of double-barrelled substantive- 
adjectives and acBective-substantives,. too familiar after- 
wards in Le Pere Vuchene— “ let them come ! ” growled the 
wine-soaked patriot, “ and we will give them — ^ere nom. ! 
what is there which we will not give them ? ” 

And then the tipsy patriots retired to an angle of the forti- 
fication, and began to play the intellectual game of houclwn^ 
forgetful of the lady whoin they had escorted so far, for an 
afternoon on the walls of Paris. 

Gaston shouldered his chassepot, and began to walk slowly 
up and down. Suzon followed nim, came close to his side, 
and hissed in his ear. 

“ And so you are happy with your child-wife ? ” 

“ I am as happy as Fate ever allowed a man to be in this 
world. Fate gave me the fairest and best for my companion, 
and then said. ‘Thou shalt find thou hast filled thy cup of 
joyinaday of trouble and war. Thou shalt drink only a 
drop at a time — a drop now and then — as the miser spends 
his gold.’ ” 

‘Mjucky for you, lucky for her, that it is so,” retorted 
Suzon, fiercely, “ for you may so much the less soon grow 
weary of your waxwork wife.’* 

“ I shall never weary of her,” said Gaston. “ Every day 
draws us nearer. We may tire of life and its troubles, never 
of each other.” 

“ So you think now, while this fancy of yours has all the 
gloss of freshness. But you will weary of her. She is pretty 
enough, I grant you ; lovely, if you like ; but her face has no 
more expression than a June lily ; aiKi you, who have a mind 
full of force and fire, must wea:^ of such placid inanity. Do 
you think I do not know you— I, who have heard you talk in 
the days gone by— I, who was your confidante when you 
were penniless and unknown? You are beginning to be 
famous now. You sign your articles, and menYalk about 
them and about the writer. You are pointed at in the street. 


UNDER THE RED FLAG 

But I admired you when none other admired you. I believed 
in you when you were nobody.” 

“ You were always very amiable, citoyenne, and I hope I 
did not prove my self unworthy of your esteem,” said Gaston, 
with a ceremonious bow. 

He had an idea that a storm was coming, and he wanted 
to ward off the lightning, if possible, by taking things easily. 

You proved yourself a seducer and a liar ! ” she answered 
savagely, her splendid -eyes flaming as she looked at him, 
one red spot on either cheek, like a burning coal, her white 
liX)s quivering. 

She had given herself over to the rule of her passionate 
nature m this new period of tumult and uncertahity, a time 
when all the old boundaries seemed to be swept away, the 
floodgates of passion opened. A ^ueen, a goddess, in her 
chosen circle, she had come to think herself a being bound 
by no law, possessing the divuie right of beauty and wit, free 
to pour out her love or her vemon upon whom she would ; 
and to-day Fate had brought her face to face with the man 
to whom she had given the impassioned love of her too fer- 
vid nature, for whose sake she had been, and must ever be, 
marble to every other lover. 

“ You are mad,” he said, quietly, “ and your words are the 
words of a mad woman.” 

“ They are true words. Seducer— for you seduced me into 
loving you — yes, as few men have ever been loved, as few 
v/omen.know how to love. Seducer ! yes. Your every word, 
your every look, meant seduction, in those dear days when 
you and I wandered homewards in the midnight and moon- 
light, and loitered on the bridge or on the quay, and drank 
each other’s whispers, and looked into each other’s eyes, and 
our hands trembled as they touched. Liar ! for though you 
never declared yourself my lover, all your words were 
steeped in love. When we have sat together, side by side, 
in the theatre, my head leaning against your shoulder, our 
hands clasped as we drew nearer to each other, feeling as if 
we were alone in the darkened house— what need of words 
then to promise love? Your every look, your every touch, 
was a promise ; and all those promises you broke when you 
deserted me for your new fancy; and by every touch of your 
hand, by every look in your eyes, I charge you with having 
promised me your lifelong love, I charge you with having 
lied to me ! ” 

There was no doubt as to the reality of her feeling, the 
intensity of her sense of wrong done to her in those days of 
the past. Gaston stood before her, downcast and conscience 
stricken. 

Yes, if passionate looks and tender claspings of tremulous 
hands meant anything, he had so far pledged his faith— he 
was in so much a liar. His boyish fancy had been caught by 


6o 


UNDER THE RED FLAG, 


chis Southern beauty, by this passionate nature, which made 
an atmosphere of warmth aromicl it, and gave to the calm 
moonbeams of a Parisian midnight the seducing softness of 
the torrid zone. He had been drawn to her in those moonlit 
hours as young hearts are drawn together mider the South- 
ern Cross; and then came morning, and worldly wisdom, 
and the sense of his own dignity ; and he told himself, with 
a half-guilty feeling, that those looks and whispers on the 
moonlit quay meant nothing. A pretty woman who kept a 
popular cremerie must have admirers by the score ; and 
when she was not being escorted to the Parte St. Martin by 
him, was doubtless tripping as lightly to the Chateau d’Eau 
with somebody else. 

These were the amours passagetys of youth, which count 
for nothing in the sum of a man’s life. 

Then came the new and better love. Kathleen’s fair 
young face became the pofestar of his destiny ; and from that 
hour he held himself aloof from Suzon JMichel. And now 
she came upon him, like a guilty conscience, and charged 
him with having lied to her. 

“ I am very sorry you should have taken our friendship so 
seriously,” he said, quietly. “ I thought that I was only one 
among your many admirers— that you had such lovers as I 
by the score. So pretty a woman could not fail to attract 
suitors.” 

“ 1 had admirers, as you say, by the score ; but not one 
for whom I cared, not one upon whose breast my head ever 
rested as it lay on yours mat night at the street corner, 
when you kissed me for the first— last — time. It -was within 
a week of that kiss you abandoned me forever.” 

“ A foolish kiss,” said Gaston, again trying to take things 
lightly ; “ but those eyes of yours had a magical influence in 
the lamplight. My dear soul, we were onlv children, stray- 
ing a little way along a flowery patli whicli leads to a wood 
full of wild beasts and all manner of horrors. Why make a 
fuss about it, since we stopped in good time, and never went 
into the wood ? ” 

This was a kind of argument hardly calculated to pacify 
a jealous woman. Suzon took no notice of it. 

“ What was she better than I— that fair-haired Irish girl 
• —that you should forsake me to marry her ? ” 

“ Why make unflattering comparisons ? I only know 
that from the hour I first saw her I lived a new life. You 
were charming, but you belonged to the old life ; and so I 
was obliged to sing the old song, — 

“ ‘ Adieu, paniers, vendanges sont faites ! ’ ” 

“ C^est za. You threw me aside as if I had been an empty 
basket after the vintage. But the vintage is not oyer yet, 


UNDER THE RED FLAG. 


6i 


Or, at least, the wiiie has still to be made, and I know what 
color it will be.” 

“ Indeed ! ” he said, gayljr, rolling up a cigarette. 

His watch was just expiring ; and even it it were not, the 
discipline on the walls was not severe. 

“ It will be red, red, red— the color of blood.” 

The game of houchon had j ust ended in a tempest of oaths 
and squabbling, and the patriot came swaggering and stag- 
gering towards the spot where Suzon stood with gloomy 
brow, and eyes fixed upon the ground. 

“Come, Citoyenne Michel, come to the canteen, and 
empty a- bottle oi petit bleu with us. '' Haut rincer le hec avant 
(lepartir. Let it not l)e said that the National Guard are 
without hospitality.” 


CHAPTER VII. 

“headstrong liberty is lashed with woe.” 

New Year’s Day had come and gone — a dark and dreary 
New Tear for many a severed household; the mother and 
her children afar, the father- lonely in Paris, not knowing if 
the letter which he w'rites daily to the wife he loves may not 
be written to the dead— for it is months since he has had tid- 
ings of wife or child, and who can tell where the angel of 
death may have visited ? A change had come over the great 
city, and tile spirits of the people— brave still, bearing their 
burden gallantly, still crying their cry of “ No surrender ! ” 
but gay and light of heart no longer, bowed down by the 
weight of ever-increasing wretchedness, pinched by the sharp 
pangs of hunger, enfeebled by disease, tortured by the bitter 
cold of a severe winter, which just now is the hardest trial 
of all. And now, in these dai-k days^ after Christmas, the 
ice is broken, the siege, for which. Paris has been waiting pa- 
tiently three months, begins in bitter earnest, and the thun- 
der Oi the guns shakes earth and skies. The Line, the ido- 
bile, the National Guard, all do their duty ; but at best they 
can only die bravely for a cause that has long been lost. The 
bombardment ceases not day or night — now on this side, now 
on that. In tlie trenches the men suffer horribly. The snoAV 
falls on the living as well as the dead. Every sortie results 
iu heavy loss. The ambulances are all full to overflowing. 
Trocliu, the ii-resolute, the man of ])roclamations and mani- 
festoes, has given place to Vinoy ; but what generalship can 
hold a beleaguered city against those grim captains Famine 
and Death? ' 

The women wear their burden with a quiet resignation 
w'iiicb is among the most heroic things in history. Day 


62 


Vnder the red flag. 


after day, in the early winter dawn, they stand in the dismal 
train of householders waiting for the allotted portion of meat 
—a portion so scanty that it seems bitterest irony to carry it 
home to a hungry family. There they stand— ladies, servants, 
workwomen, from the highest to the lowest — buffeted by the 
savage northeaster, snowed upon, hailed upon, shivering, 
pale, exhausted, but divinely patient, each feeling that in 
this silent suffering she contributes her infinitesimal share 
of heroism to the defence, of her country. So long as her 
rulers will hold out, so long as her soldiers will fio'ht and 
die, so long will the women of France submit and suffer. 
Their voices will never be joined in the cry, “ Surrender for 
our sakes.” 

The little children are fading off the face of this troubled 
scene. That is the worst martyi'dom of all for the mothers. 
The little faces are growing pinched and haggard, the fragile 
forms are drooping, drooping, day by day. The mothers and 
fathers hope against hope. In a day or two the siege will be 
raised ; milk and bread, fuel, comfort, luxury, the joy and 
light of life, will return to those desolate households ; 
and the droo]:)ing children will revive, and grow strong 
again. And, while the mothers hope, the little ones are 
dying, and the little coffins are seen, in mournful proces- 
sions, day by day, and hour by hour, in the cold, cheerless 
streets. 

At the butchers’ shops, at the bakeries, there the same 
dismal train waits day after day. Everything is scarce. 
Butter is forty-five francs a pound ; the coarsest grease, rank 
fat, which the servants would throw into the grease-tub in 
times of plenty, is sold for eighteen francs a pound. Gruyere 
cheese is a thing beyond all price, and is only bought by the 
rich, who wish to offer a costly present, like a basket of 
strawberries in February or peaches in March. Potatoes 
are twenty-five francs a bushel ; a cabbage six francs ; and 
garden-stuff, which last year one would have hardly ottered 
to the rabbits, is now the luxurious accomi)animent of the 
pot-aii-feu de cheval. There is no more gas for the street- 
lamps, and the once brilliant Lutetia is a city of Cimmerian 
darkness. Bitterest scarcity of all, fuel has become prodigi- 
ously dear; and the poor are shivering, dying, in their des- 
olate garrets, pinched and blue with the cold of a hard 
winter. 

Even among the well-to-do classes, funds are running low. 
Provisions at siege prices have exhausted the purses of 
middle-class citizens. Stocks have been sold at a terrible 
loss, capital has been exhausted. Ruin and hunger stare in 
at the windows, and haunt the snowy night like spectres. 

For the poor the struggle is still ‘ sharper ; but the poor 
are familiar with the pinch of poverty, with the pangs of 
self-denial. And then, perhaps, there is more done for the 


UNDER THE RED FLAG. 


h 

indigent in this day of national calamity than was done for 
them in the golden years of prosperity ; albeit the empire, 
wliatever its shortcomings, was not neglectfnl of the house- 
less and the hungry. 

In all these troubled days — with surrender and shame far 
away yonder at Metz, with defeat on this side and on that, 
here a general slain, and there a gallant leader sacrihced, a 
little gain one day only to be counterbalanced by a greater 
loss the next, a threatened revolution, Flourens and his crew 
strutting, booted and spurred, on the tables in the Hotel de 
Yille, little explosions of popular feeling at Belleville, semi- 
revolt at Montmartre — through all this time of wild fears 
and wilder hopes the Red Flag has been boldly mifuiied in 
the face of Paris, and has managed to pay its contributors. 
When bread and. meat are so dear, who would stuit himself 
of his favorite newspaper, in which, for two sous, he may 
read words that burn like vitriol, sentences that sound like 
the hissing of vinegar flung upon white-hot iron ? The Red 
Flag flnds some pretty strong language for the expression 
of its opinions about William, and Bismarck, and Moltke, 
and the hordes of black helmets yonder ; but this language 
is mild as compared with the venom which it spits upon the 
empire that is vanished — the Man of Sedan, the Man of 
Metz, the Emperor who surrendered empire and army— all 
that could be surrendered — in the first hour of reverse ; the 
general who kept the flower of the French army locked up 
within the walls of a beleaguered city, tied hand and foot, 
when they Avere pining to be up and doing, hungering for 
the fray, eager to fling themselves into the teeth of the foe, 
to cut their way to liberty or to de&,th, only to hand them 
over to the enemy like a nock of sheep, when he found that 
his imperialist game was played out and the stakes lost irre- 
trievably. 

At last came that which seemed the crowning humiliation, 
a capitulation which, to the soul of the patriot, was more 
shameful than that of Sedan, more irreparable than Stras- 
burg, more fatal than Metz. Paris surrendered her forts, 
and opened her gates to the invader : France gave up her 
provinces, and pledged herself to the payment of a monstrous 
indemnity. The flag of the Germanic Confederation floated 
above Mont Valerian, and the Guard of the Emperor of 
Germany defiled along the Avenue du Grande Armee to en 
camp in the Champs' Elysees. Hark and mournful was the 
aspect of Paris on that never to be forgotten day. The popu- 
lace held themselves aloof from the region occupied by the 
invaders, as from the scene of a pestilence. Those who bame 
as captors were as prisoners in the conquered city. The 
theatres were closed, and Paris mourned in gloom and silence 
for the ruin of France. And on the morning of departure, 
when, after an occupation of only twenty-four hours, the 


64 UNDER THE RED FLAG. 

barbarous flood swept back, the Parisian gamin was seen 
pursuing the rearguard of William’s soldier}^, burning per- 
lumes on red-hot shovels, as if to purify the air after the pas- 
sage of some loathsome beast. 

Unhappily for Paris there were worse enemies than 
William and his square-heads lurking in the background, 
enemies long suspected and feared, and now to be revealed 
in all their power for evil. 

With the opening of the gates began an emigration of the 
respectable classes. Husbands and fathers hastened to re- 
join their families, provincials returned to their provinces ; 
one hundred thousand of the National Guard, good citizens, 
brave, loyal, devoted to the cause of order, are said to have 
left Paris at this time. Those who remained behind were, 
for the most part, an armed mob, demoralized by idleness, 
by drink, by the teaching of a handful of rabid Republicans, 
the master-spirits of Belleville and Montmartre. 

Too soon the storm burst. There is no darker day in the 
history of France than this 18th of March, 1871, on which 
Paris found itself given over to a horde of which it 
knew neither the strength nor the malignity, but from 
which it feared the worst. Hideous faces, which in peaceful 
times lurk in the hidden depths of a city, showed themselves 
in the open day, at every street corner, irony on the lip, and 
menace in the eye. A day which began with the seizure of 
the cannon at Chaumont and Montmartre by the Com- 
munards, and the desertion of the troops of the Line to the 
insurgents, ended with the murder of Generals Lecomte 
and clement Thomas, and the withdrawal of the govern- 
ment and the loyal troops to Versailles. 

When night fell Paris was abandoned to a new power, 
which called itself Central Committee of the Federation ; and 
it seemed that two hundred and fifty battalions of the Na- 
tional-Guard had become Federals. They were for the 
most part Federals without knowing Avhy or wherefore. 
They knew as little of the chiefs who were to command 
them as that doomed city upon which they were too 
soon to establish a reign oL ignominy and terror. But 
the Central Committee, sustained by the International and 
its powerful organization, was strong enough to command in 
a disorganized and abandoned city; and on the 19th of 
March began the great orgy of the Commune, the rule of 
blood and fire. The offal of journalism, the scum of the jails, 
sat in the seat of judgment. Rigault, Ferre, Eudes, Serizier 
— Blanquistes, Hebertistes— these were now the masters of 
Paris. Tliey held the prisons ; they commanded the National 
Guard. They made laws and unmade them ; they drank 
and smoked and rioted m the Hotel de Ville ; they held their 
obscene orgies in palaces, in churches, in the pulfiic offices, 
and the jails, where the innocent and the noble were Ian- 


UNDER THE RED FLAG. 


65 

•guishing in a sliamefnl bondage, waiting for a too' i)robable 
death. There were those who asked whether William and 
Bismarck would not have been better than these. 

For Gaston Mortemar, an enthusiastic believer in Com- 
munism and the International, it seemed as if this new reign 
meant regeneration, lie was revolted by the murder of the 
two generals, but he saw in that crime the work of a mili- 
tary mob. lie kncAV but little of the men who were now at 
the helm. Assy, one of the best of them, had protested 
against the violence of his colleagues, and had been flung 
into prison. Flonrens, the beloved of Belleville, was killed 
in a skirmish with the Versaillais, while the Commune was 
still young. Hard for a man of, intellect and honor to be- 
lieve in the scum of humanity winch now ruled at the Hotel 
de Ville, and strutted in tinsel and feathers, like mounte- 
banks at a fair. But Gaston had faith in the cause if he 
doubted the men. iiie red flag, flying from the pinnacles 
where the tricolor had so lately hung, was, to his mind, a 
symbol of man’s equal rights, the uprising of a down-trodden 
])eople, the divine right of evei-y man to be his own master. 
For this cause he wrote with all the fervor and force of his 
pen. 

The arrest of the archbishop and his fellow-sufferers, on 
the 6th of April, was the first shock which disturbed Gaston 
^lortemar’s faith in the men who ruled Paris. That act ap- , 
peared unjustifiable even in the* eyes of one who held the 
sanctit}^ of the priesthood somewhat lightly. The spotless 
reputation and noble character of the chief victim made the 
deed sacrilege. Gaston did not measure the words in which 
he denounced this arrest. He had expressed himself 
strongly also upon the imprisonment of Citoyen Bon jean, 
the good President. From that hour the Red Flag was a 
suspected naper. The man who was not with the Commune, 
heart and hand, in its worst follies, its bloodiest crimes, was 
a marked man. 

The denunciation of Gustave Chaudey, the journalist, by 
Vermesch, the editor of the infamous Pere Duchene^ fol- 
lowed within twenty-four hours by his arrest and imprison- 
ment, was the next rude blow. ^Vgain Gaston denounced 
the tyrants of the Hotel de Ville : and this time retaliation 
was immediate. The Red Flag w^as suppressed, and proprie- 
tor and contributprs were threatened with arrest. Gaston’s 
occupation was gone. His economies of the past had been 
exhausted by the evil days of the siege, and he found him- 
self penniless. 

He was not altogether disheartened. He sat himself 
down to write satirical ballads, which were printed, secretly, 
at the old office, and sold by the hawkers in the streets ; and 
in these days of fever-heat and perpetual agitation the 
public pence flowed freely for the purchase of squibs which 


66 


UNDER THE RED FLAG. 


hit right or left, Versailles, or Paris, Republic or Commune. 
The little household in the Rue Git le Coeur, a fragile bark 
to be tossed on such a tempestuous^ sea, managed thus to 
breast the waves gallantly for a little while longer, and 
Durand’s kindly oner of help was refused, as not yet needed. 

Soon after hearing of the arrest of the archbishop and 
the other priests, Gaston made a jiilgrimage a little way out 
of Paris. He went to visit his old friends the Dominican 
monks, at the school of Albert the Great, and to ascertain 
for himself whether any storm-cloud was darkening over 
those defenceless heads. Who could tell where those in 
power might look for their next victims ? Priests and ser- 
gents de mile were the hetes noires of the Communards. 

All was tranquil at the , Dominican School. The house 
had been turned into an ambulance by the fathers during 
the siege ; and it was still used for the same purpose under 
the Commune. The Domicians could have no affection for a 
government which turned churches into clubs, forbade pub- 
lic worship, and imprisoned priests; but they were ready to 
give shelter to the wounded Federals, and to attend them 
with that divine charity which asks no questions as to the 
creed of the sufferer. 'I’hey had a right to suppose that the 
Geneva Cross would protect their house. 

Out of the doors they did not pass without insults. The 
house had the reputation of being rich, and the Commu 
nards began to talk of hidden treasures. The Dominicans 
let them say their say, turned a deaf ear to opprobrious 
epithets, appeared in public as little a s possible, and confided 
themselves to the mercy of God. Gaston saw Father Cap- 
tier, the good prior ; offered to serve him in. any way within 
his power, which unhappily, was of the smallest ; thanked 
him for all his goodness in the past, and talked with him of 
the future, which was not full of promise. And so they 
parted, each trying to ch-eer the other with hopeful speech, 
each oppressed by the dread of impending troubles. 

Serizier, the colonel of the 13th legion, had established 
his headquarters in a nobleman’s chateau adjoining the 
Dominican School, and he looked with no fiiendl'y eye upon 
the fathers, whose garden lay within sight of his drawing- 
room windows. The seizure of the fort at Tssy aggravated 
the already dangerous position of the monks. The Federals, 
forced to evacuate their position, fell back upon Arcueil and 
Cachan, and the 13th legion encamped in the environs of the 
Dominican School. The fathers began to fear that the 
Geneva Cross would not protect them forever. 

On May 17th a fire broke out in the roof of the chateau 
occupied by Serizier. The Dominicans hurried to the rescue, 
tucked up their robes, and succeeded in extinguishing the 
flames. Serizier sent for them, and tliey appeared before 
hini, expecting to be thanked and praised. 


UNDER THE RED FLAG, 


67 

^ To their sipprise they were treated as 'Spies, ser gents de 
ville in disguise ; they were accused of having themselves 
set fire to the roof, which was to serve as a signal to the 
Versaillais. They protested, but in vain. 

“We shall make a quick finish of the shaven-polls,” said 
Serizier. 

On the 18th of May, Leo Meillet. commander of the fort 
at Bicetre, was ordered to arrest tne Dominicans, with all 
their subordinates. To accomplish this perilous expedition 
he required no less than two battalions of Federals, one of 
which was the notorious 101st, commanded by Serizier. 

Gaston Mortemar heard of the mtended arrest on the 
evening of the 18th. He spent the greater part of the night 
going from place to place, interviewing those delegates of 
whom he knew something, and from whose influence he 
might hope something. He urged each of these to strike a 
blow in defence of those guiltless monks, to interfere to pre- 
vent an arrest which might end in murder. But in vain. 
The chiefs of the Commune had grander schemes in hand 
than the rescue of a handful of harmless monks. 

Gaston was at the school early on the 19th. If he could 
do nothing to help his old friends, he could at least be near 
them in their day of peril. He was with them when the 
101st battalion invested their house, and he shared their 

S eril. Serizier recognized him as the orator of the Folies 
tergeres, the editor of the suppressed lied Flag — a paper 
which had published some hard things about the colonel 
of the 101st. He ordered Mortemar to be arrested with the 
monks. 

“ So you are a pupil of the Dominicans,” he exclaimed — 
“ a worthy pupil of such masters. We know now where you 
learned to spit venom at honest patriots. You shall stew 
together in the same sauce ! ” 

The capture was made, after but little resistance. Father 
Captier, feeling the responsibility of his office as prior, en- 
treated to be allowed to put his seal on the outer doors of the 
house. This grace was accorded without difiiculty. Those 
who granted the boon well knew the futility of such a pre- 
caution. 

At seven o-clock in the evening the prisoners arrived at 
the fort of Bicetra, after having endured every kind of out- 
rage on the way there. They were flung into a yard, huddled 
together like frightened sheep, standing bareheaded under 
frequent showers, stared at like wild beasts by the National 
Guard. At one o’clock in the morning they were thrown into 
a casemate, where they could lie on the ground and rest their 
heads against the stone wall. In vain the Dominicans as- 
serted their innocence, and demanded to be set at liberty. 
The only answers to their prayers were the obscene songs of 
their custodians. 


68 


UNDER THE RED FLAG. 


CHAPTER VIII. 

GIRT WITH FIRE. 

On the 21st, Father Captier was taken before a magistrate 
in a room in the fort, and submitted to an informal examina- 
tion. Then followed two weary days, the 22d, and 23, during 
which the prisoners were left' without food; and while the 
monks languished and hungered in the gloom of their prison 
the good people of the Commune were busy with the work of 
spoliation. Upon an order given by Leo Meillet, two battal- ^ 
ions of Federal soldiers entered the school at Arcueil, vio- 
lated seals, broke open doors, and carried off -every object of 
value, including even fifteen thousand francs in railway 
shares, the savings of the servants attached to the establish- 
ment. These were impounded as national property, and 
passed by a kind of commmiistic legerdemain into pockets 
which were never knowui to disgorge their contents. A dozen 
ammunition wagons and eight hired vehicles were needed to 
carry off the spoil. 

The school only escaped being burned to the ground by 
reason of its well-nlled cellars. Once having descended to 
these lower depths, the Federals had no desire to return to' 
the surface, until they had done justice to the Dominican 
wines. ^ They drank and wallowed there side by side, like 
swine in the mire, till the hour for burning was past, and 
thus the school of Albert the Great escaped the flames. 

On the following day Leo Meillet and the officers began to 
feel themselves in danger at the Fort of Bicetra. The army 
was drawing near. They resolved to evacuate the fort and 
fall back upon Paris, where numerous barricades, well pro- 
vided with artillery, made resistance possible, and wliere the 
steep^ and narrow streets, the labyrinthine windings and 
twistings of courts and alleys, in the old quarter of the city, 
made flight and concealment easy. 

Carriages, carts, wagons, were hurriedly requisitioned on 
every hand, and then came a flight so eager that the prison- 
ers in their casemate were forgotten. * 

“ Thank God ! ” cried Gaston, with a wild throbbing at his 
moment, that he was an infidel. 

I h© Versaillais will be here in time to save us.” And the 
good Dominicans, the men who had turned their house into 
an ambulance during the siege and the Commune, and who 
Imd imrsed the wounded Federals without a question as to 
them belief or their impiety, began to offer up their thanks- 
givings, and murmur psalms of triumph and rejoicing — those 
yersicl^ which Jewish capthes of old had siing by the wa- 
ters of Babylon, , 


UNDER THE RED EL Ad. 


69 

Alas for those pious hearts uplifted in gratitude to the 
^reat Deliverer ! not thus, not by Versaillais, was their de- 
liverance to come. They were to pass to paradise by a rougher 
road. Their joy had been premature, for they had reckoned 
without Serizier. 

And yet this Serizier was one of the master-fiends in the 
Parisian pandemonium. A currier by trade, he had been in 
early manhood the tyrant and the terror of a great currier’s 
factory at Belleville, and in the revolution of ’48 he had been 
leader of the mob which hanged the proprietor of the factory 
at his own door. He had been condemned for some political 
offence during the Empire, and had taken refuge in Belgium. 
He reappeared in Paris soon after the 4th of September, and 
played an important part in the siege. 

After March 18th ne became secretary to Leo Meillet, and 
later chief of the 13th legion. He commanded twelve bat- 
talions, which fought well at Issy, at Chatillon, and at the 
Hautes-Bruyeres. Among these battalions there was one 
which he favored above all the others, the 101st, his own par- 
ticular battalion, composed of his friends and compan- 
ions. 

A man of fiery temperament, a great talker, a deep 
drinker, a workman without industry, living upon money 
extorted from the public assistance, Serizier exercised a 
strong influence upon the ignorant and brutal beings who 
surrounded him. He was feared and obeyed by all the 13th 
arrondissement, which trembled before him. His hatred 
against the priests was a passion that almost touched on 
Imiacy. He had profaned the chimches by his foul orgies, 
and it was only the entry of the troops from Versailles which 
stopped him from selling saintly relics and sacramental 
plate by auction. 'Assassin and incendiary, it was his hand 
which fired the famous manufactory of Gobelins tapes- 
try. 

He was a man of medium height, square-shouldered, eyes 
shifty and restless, forehead low, lips thick and heavy, re- 
ceding chin, the head of a bulldog. His voice was harsh and 
hoarse, his breath exhaled cognac. When he was angry 
that rough voice broke out in cursings and fury, more like 
the howling of a savage dog than the accents of human- 
nity. 

Serizier had his own particular prison as well as his own 
particular battalion. A house in the Avenue d’ltalie had 
been transformed into a jail ; and here this man k^t those 
victims who were known as his prisoners. At the final day 
he cleared his prison by a massacre. 

Serizier had not forgotten the Dominicans and their com- 
panions. At his bidding a detachment of soldiers came in 
search of them, and they were marched into Paris by the 
Barriere Fontainebleau, amid hootings and insults and 


UNDER THE RED FLAG. 


70 

curses from the crowd, a little company of twenty hostages, 
five of whom wore the fiov/ing black and white robes of the 
order. 

No help from the French army. All yesterday they had 
been held at bay by the Federal artillery at Montrouge, and 
were only able to cross the ravine of La Bieve on the morn- 
ing of the 25th. 

The prisoners were hurried along, almost at a run, to the 
jail in the Avenue dTtalie. Embarrassed by the voluminous 
folds of their robes, they did not always walk fast enough^ 
whereupon the soldiers struck them with the butt-ends ot 
their guns, calling out, “ Quick, magpie ! ” in mockery of 
their black and white raiment : and so to the prison, which 
was already full to the brim^ containing ninety-seven pri- 
soners arrested in that district, and detained at Citoyen 
Serizier’s good pleasure. Bobeche, the jailer, fatigued by 
having to write such a list of names, had gone out to refresh 
himself with a drink. While he was away the Communards 
came to the prison to ask for the Dominicans to help in 
making the barricades ; but the deputy-jailer, having some 
respect for the religious character, sent fourteen National 
Guards, imprisoned for some military irregularity, instead 
of the priests. Bobeche, returning immediately after, was 
furious with his subordinate, and accused him of shedding 
the blood of patriots in order to spare the monks. lie had a 
detachment of the 101st battalion at his heels, and he or- 
dered those tonsured scoundrels to be brought out. 

Bertrand, the subordinate, yielded after some opposition, 
and (mened the door of the jail. 

“ Come, magpies,” cried Bobeche, “ off with you to the 
barricade ! ” 

The Dominicans came out into the avenue, where they 
saw the detachment of the 101st, with Serizier at their head. 
This time they believed that all was over ; but they were 
deceived, for their agony was to last a little longer. 

Father Cotrault, the purveyor, stopped on the threshold 
of the prison. 

“ We will go no farther, ’ he said ; “ we are men of peace. 
Our religion forbids us to shed blood ; we cannot fight, and 
we will not go to the barricade ; but even under fire we will 
search for your wounded and succor them.” 

This compromise would not have been accepted by Serizier, 
but the Communist soldiers were wavering, they were crying 
out that it would soon be impossible to hold the barricade 
against the hail of bullets from the Versaillais. 

“ Enough,” said Serizier to Father Cotrault ; “ promise to 
look after our wounded.” 

^ “ Yes, we promise,” answered the monk, “ and you know 
it is what we have always done.” 


UNDER THE RED FLAG, 


71 

Serizier made a sign to Bobeche, and the prisoners were 
bundled back into the jail. But they no longer deceived 
themselves with false hopes. They knew the respite was. 
''but brief. They prayed together, and made confession to 
each other. They might have been spared, perhaps ; but the 
news brought to Serizier was exasperating and alarming. 
Some men hying from the Quartier Batin to hght again in 
the Avenue dTtalie told how the Pantheon, the great citadel 
of the insurrection, had been taken by the Versaillais before 
there had been time to hre the mine which would have shat- 
tered dome and walls, arches and columns, in one vast' heap 
of ruin. They told how Milliere, the chief of the msurgents 
in this quarterj had been shot, and that the French troops 
occupied the prison of La Sante. The circle which was soon 
to enclose the Communards of the 13th arrondissement was 
growing narrower and narrower. 

What should they do ? Fly, or stand their ground to the 
death? 

A great many of the National Guard made off. 

Serizier gathered himself together for a final effort. 

“ Burn ! ” he gasped ; “ we must burn everything ! ” 

He rushed into a wine-shop and drank glass after glass of 
brandy. His wolfish soul, excited by alcohol, by fighting, by 
defeat, by the sight of the blood which reddened the road 
and the pavement, appeared in all its hideousness. 

“Ah, has the end come so soon ? ” he cried, striking his 
clenched fist upon the pewter counter. “ So be it ! Every- 
body must die ! ” 

He ran back to the avenue. 

“ Come, come,” he roared, “ men of the right metal, to 
smasli the skulls of those magpies ! ” 

A little crowd of Communards answered to his call, and, 
in advance of the band^ two women presented themselves. 

They were both furies— both liad streaming locks of tan- 
gled hair, which were hideously suggestive of Medusa’s 
snaky tresses ; but one of the furies was young, and would 
have been handsome if her face had not been smeared and 
spattered with blood, and blackened with gunpowder. She 
wore the costume of a vivandiere,, and had once been smart ; 
but the gold lace on her jacket hung in shreds, the blue 
cloth was stained with blood and mire. She carried a gun, 
which, in her exhaustion, she handed to Serizier, signing to 
him to reload it for her. She had hardly breath enough left 
for speech. 

“ The priests,” she murmured, hoarsely, as Serizier gave 
her back the loaded gun ; “ are they to be finished— at once ?” 

“At once,” he answered ; “ there is no time for ceremony 
Avith those scoundrels. They have had their day, and have 
made fools of you all long enough, Avith their mummeries— 
men, Avomenj and children.” 


UMdbr the red flag. 


“ They have never fooled me,” answered the woman ; “ I 
am a Voltairian.” 

“Ah, ce Voltaire ; if he had lasted till our time we 
should have shown him some pretty farces,” said Serizier, 
turning away from her to give his orders. 

While he ranged his men along the avenue, and talked 
apart Avith Bobeclie the jailer, the woman in the vivandiere 
dress stood leaning on her gun, looking along the road, 
through dim smoke-clouds and dust and nre. 

It was four o’clock in the warm May afternoon — May on 
the edge of June. The Avestern horizon of Paris Avas hidden 
behind the smoke of incendiary fires ; the ground trembled 
Avith the force of the cannonade. The Avoman wiped the 
SAveat and mire from her face Avith the sleeve of her jacket, 
and looked across the scene of ruin and desolation Avith fiery 
eyes. She looked yonder toAvards the toAvers of Notre Dame, 
toAvards the Quai des Augustins, and the labyrmth of little 
streets behind those old roofs. 

“ Not much chance of wedded bliss for those two now,” 
she said to herself. “ Their honeymoon was short ; but her 
misery shall be long. She and her sister are shut in their 
lodgings, expecting to be burned alive every hour ; and he is 
in mison— AAdiat prison, I wonder ? ” 

The Avoman was Suzon Michel, and the man of whom she 
was thinking as she stood at ease by her gun, Avaiting to do 
her part, as a strong-minded woman and a patriot, in the 
slaughter of the priests, was Gaston Mortemar. 

Since his arrest she had been able to learn nothing about 
him. She had been told by her friends, the Communards, 
that he had been arrested on account of something he had 
Avritten in his paper. More than this they Avould not or 
could not tell her. There were so many prisons in Paris, all 
teeming Avith life, like beehives ; there Avere such innumer- 
able arrests. People hardly cared to inquire why their neigh- 
l)ors Avere carried off, or whither. Human feelings, friend- 
ship, brotherly love were apt to become deadened in that 
pandemonium. 

Since the week of fightings and fires began, Suzon had 
been in the thick of all the strife. She had carried her can 
of petroleum as bravely as any of those bearded ruffians who- 
pretended to make light of her services. She had helped in 
the fires, she had helped in the carnage, like the very spirit 
of evil. It Avas not arson, it was not murder. It was only 
justice, an eye for an eye. 

“ They are killing our brothers and friends yonder,” said 
the assassins, as they shot doAvn ncAv victims. 

Mercy at such a time Avould be coAvardice. Only a craven 
would hold his luind Avhen there Avas such a grand chance of 
avenging the Avrongs of nobody in particular. 

Suzon was drunk \Adth blood ; half-lfiinded by fire. Those 


UNDER THE RED FLAG 


73 

flashing eyes of hers, bright as they were, saw all things 
dimly, through a fiery haze. 

The priests— yes, she would help to slaughter them ; not 
because she knew anything about this particular brood of 
calotins, but because she hated all priests. They had done 
her no wrong ; but her pious neighbors had despised her for 
keepuig away from church ; they had thrown their religion 
in her face ; they had scorned her for her infidelity. 

Beware of that woman ! ” said an old man whom she 
had olfended. “ The woman who never crosses the thresh- 
old of a church belongs to a venomous species.” 

Yes,' she would help in the good work. How the earth' 
shivered under that awful camionade ! The enemy was at 
the door ; nearer and nearer came the thunder of the guns. 
The deadly rain from the mitrailleuses came fast as the heavy 
drops of a thunder-shower. The afternoon sun looked red 
as blood, yonder, as its lurid rays pierced the smoke. The 
circle was narrowing, narrowing, narrowing, closing in upon 
them like a ring of fire. Whom would they spare, those 
Versaillais devils? Not one. Universal carnage would 
change the streets of Paris to rivers of blood, lit by a city in 
flames. Not a life, n6t a house would be spared ! 

“ Let us begin ! ” shrieked Suzon, beside herself ; “ let us 
work with such a good-will that there shall be nothing left 
for those others to do.” 

“ Are you ready ? ” asked Serizier, facing the door of the 
prison, with his assassins ranged on either side of him. 

“No one of them shall escape, my general,” answered 
Suzon, grasping her gun. 

Her voice was hoarse and rough, like his own. From 
head to heel, mind, soul, body, the creature had unsexed her- 
self ; and these men-wonien were even more savage than the 
devil-men of those days, for they thought their infamy hero- 
ism and their cruelty courage. Not one of these furies, 
Ava,ving her petroleum-can, shouldering her chassepot, but 
fancied herself a modern Maid of Orleans. 

And now the victims were driven into the street, like 
sheep to the slaughter-house. 

“ Pass, one by one,” cried Bebeche the jailer, who held his 
six-year-old son by the hand. 

Was it not well for the boy to see the tonsured heads laid 
low ? It is thus France rears her patriots— young Romans 
suckled by the wolf Revolution. 

The Dominicans, the school-servants, the journalist 
crossed the fatal threshold. The first to pass was Father 
Cotrault, and, at the third step, he fell, struck by a bullet. 

The prior turned to his companion. 

“ Come, my friends, for the love of God,” he said, in his 
mild voice ; and he and his little train rushed into the open, 
apd ran athwart the rain of bullets. 


74 


UNDER THE RED FLAG. 


Suzon flung herself into the midst of the road, at tlie risk 
of being shot down in the melee. She loaded and reloaded 
her chassepot, crying, “ Cowards, cowards ! they are running 
away ! ” , 

It was not a butchery, but a battue. The poor human 
game tried to flee, hid itself behind the trees, slipped along 
under the lee of the houses. Women at open windows 
clapped their hands and shrieked with as they watched 
the sport ; in the street men shook their fists at the victims ; 
the scene was alive with insult and laughter, voices that 
sounded like the howling of furious beasts. It was a new 
carnival of flowers and sugarplums ; only the flowers were 
insult and outrage, the sugarplums were bullets. 

Some of the more active gained the side streets, and es- 
caped the leaden shower. Five of the priests, seven of the 
scnool-servants, were shot down in a heap before the Cha- 
pelle Brea. 

“ Fire, Are upon them ! ” cried Serizier, when a convulsive 
movement showed that life still throbbed amidst this mass 
of death, and one poor bleeding form that had faintly stirred 
received thirty-one bullets. 

“ See,” cried Suzon, as Mortemar, slender, active, lithe, 
with youth and vigor on his side, sped lightly along the 
boulevard and vanished at a distant turning, “there goes 
one that will cheat us ! ” 

She rushed off in pursuit of him breathless, panting, mad 
with rage. Two of Serizier’s lambs ran with her, pleasant- 
ly excited by the chase. The hunters reached the turning, 
and there, a few paces down the narrow street, leaning 
against a lamp-post, exhausted by the rapidity of his flight, 
stood their quarry. 

The men fired instantly. Suzon lifted her gun to her 
shoulder, and then suddenly let it fall to her side. She 
dashed her hand across her eyes. Was it a dream? Was 
she forever haunted, waking as well as sleeping, by that one 
face ? Through the haze of blood and fire she saw the face 
of the man she loved— loved and hated, and hated and loved. 
She scarce knew which feeling was dominant in a breast 
where both fires burned so fiercely. She saw him, pale as 
ashes, his livid lips parted, his eyes staring wildly, as men 
look into the face of sudden violent death ; haunted human- 
ity at bay, the hounds closing round, the huntsman ready 
with his knife. A thin stream of blood trickled down the 
pale face. One of the bullets had grazed his temple. 

“ Hold, hold ! ” shrieked Suzon, throwing aside her gun, 
and stretching her arms wide in passionate entreaty ; do 
not Are!” 

Too late ; another volley whistled past her, as she sank on 
her knees, screaming, pleading, blaspheming. She did not 
know how to pray. 


U^^DER THE RED FLAG, 


75 


Gaston Mortemar fell without a groan. 

Suzon sprang to her feet, picked up her gun, and struck 
at the Communards with the butt end, flinging about her 
like a devil. 

Serizier’s lambs burst out laughing. They thought she 
was drunk. In those days^ when the very atmosphere breath- 
ed cognac and absinthe, it was only natural that a woman 
should be drunk. They laughed, and left her, having done 
all there was to do here ; left her gro'^elling on the ground 
by the lamp-post, alone with her dead, the warm May sun 
shming on her through the smoke of the battle, the air smel- 
ling of blood and burning. 

While she hung over the prostrate figure, l 3 dng face 
downwards on the bloody dust, the rhythmical trot of the 
cavalry sounded in the distance, and the French troops were 
entering the Avenue dTtalie. Serizier had retired into the 
prison when the carnage was over, and was occupied in re- 
vising a list of the victims who were to be despatched 
with something more of formality than he had deemed ne- 
cessary in the case of the Dominicians ; but at the moment 
when he was about to order out the first prisoner upon his 
list, his lieutenant rushed in, and whispered in his ear. 

All was over. The column of cavalry was seen advan- 
cing. The colonel of the 13th legion flung aside his papers, 
dashed into the avenue, threw himself into one of the nouses 
communicating with the Avenue de Choisy, and disap- 
peared. 

When the French troops arrived they fomid nothing but 
mutilated corpses. 


CHAPTER IX. 

THE NIGHT WATCH OF DEATH. 

Fearful was the night that followed that hideous day. 
Burning, burning, burning ; burning and bloodshed every- 
where. The battle had become a massacre, the conflagra- 
tion a sea of fire. Never had been seen such destruction. 
The public granaries on the quay, the vast storehouses of 
Villette, eight hundred burning houses, and as many more 
newly set on fire, the D’Orsay barracks, the Tuileries, the 
Palais Royal, the Palace of the Legion of Honor, the Court 
of Archives, the Hotel de Ville, theatres, manufactories, li- 
braries, the Rue de Lille, the Rue de Bac, blazing and fall- 
ing into ruin, made Paris seem one mighty brazier, through 
which wound the Seine, like a river of molten brass. 

During the earlier part of the struggle the regular troops 
had obeyed the order of their leaders with calm submission, 


UNDER THE RED FLAG. 


76 

doing their duty bravely in that worst of all combats — street 
warfare. But as the conflict went on, the sight of those 
flaming ruins, the savagery of the insurgents, exasperated 
them, and it was no longer possible to restrain their fury. 
Their hearts were hardened by many a bitter memory of past 
sufferings— of wasted heroism, of captivity, sickness, hun- 
ger, long stages upon inhospitable roads, the shame of un- 
deserved defeat— sufferings for which their sole recompense 
had been injury and insult, And these, who had fired the- 
most glorious monuments of France, assassinated her brav- 
est and best, what had they done during the war ? They 
had drunk and swaggered, and held forth in wine-shops ; 
they had strengthened the hands of the foe by their squab- 
bles and revolts, and had garnered their strength for the 
work of bloodshed and universal destruction. 

The soldiers, who had been accused of cowardice, who 
had been hooted as “ capitulards,” felt that in striking a ter- 
rible blow they were not only obeying the law, but avenging 
their country. The revolt had been pitiless; the punish- 
ment was untempered by mercy. The Sanguinary laws 
which the Commune had promulgated recoiled upon herself. 
She, who had murdered her priests and soldiers, her justices 
and senators, perished in her turn by slaughter as merciless 
as her own. 

All through that night of horror Philip Durand watched 
by the bedside of his wife and her new born infant in the 
line Git la Coeur. The little street was safe in its obscurity, 
safe from the malice ,of the incendiaries, who had bigger 
game for their sport ; but the conflagration was terribly near. 
All the sky was lurid with reflected fire, and the thunder of 
the cannonade and the rush and roar of the flames were 
heard in every gust of wind which blew this way. while 
every now and then came the sharp sudden sound 01 an ex- 
plosion— another roof blown up, another wall falling. 

The atmosphere was poisoned by the odors of petroleum, 
and the thick rank smoke from the Granaries of Abundance 
where the stores of wine, oil, and dried fish fed the fierce- 
ness of the flames and intensified the stench of burning, 
Everywhere the work of destruction was being hurried on. 
The Commune was at the last gasp ; these explosions and 
burnings were the death-rattle. 

The little courtyard below Durand’s windows was alive 
with people, going out and coming in, restless, anxious, 
alarmed, talking to each other in doorways or at open win- 
dows, bringing in the last news, which was as likely to be 
false as true. 

Durand opened a window of the little Bolon softly, while 
Bose slept, and looked out. 

“ They are burning Notre Dame,” said a man in the court, 
Beeing him at the window, and eager tq impart his informa- 


UNDER THE RED FLAG, 


77 

tion. “ They have piled barrels of petroleum all the lengtla 
of the nave, naif-way to the roof^ and they are going to set it 
on fire. The grand old roof will fiy into the air presently, 
like a pack of cards. It will be a sight worth seeing,” hurry- 
ing out as if to a play. 

“St. Eustache is on fire,” said another man, “and they 
are going to burn the Prefecture of Police, Rigault and his 
chums have been having a great supper there— seas of wine 
mountains of provision— and now they know their day is 
over, and they are going to blow up the building.” 

I)urand shut the window. A palace more or less, a church 
more or less ! What did it matter amidst this universal ruin ? 
the Prussians at the door ; the government weak, vacillating, 
the sport of circumstances ; Prance in tatters, unable to 
save her bishops, her generals, her counsellors, her soldiers ; 
given over as a prey to a sanguinary populace. 

This strong, clear-headed man sat down crushed by the 
weight of his country’s desolation. He whose brain was 
usually quick to plan, cool to execute his plans, now felt 
powerless to look beyond the horror of the hour ; but the 
ruin which overwhelmed him was not the destruction that 
reigned without his dwelling. It was the blank within, that 
empty home upstairs, which filled him with horror, whicli 
was ever in his mind as a haunting fear. 

It was three days since Gaston had disappeared, and now 
Kathleen was gone. She had slipped out unseen by the 
porter or by any of the neighbors. She had vanished like a 
ghost at break of day. When he went up to her rooms this 
morning to carry her the best news of her sister, to cheer and 
comfort her, and buoy up her sinking hopes, as he had done 
all through the two previous days of her trouble, he found 
the nest deserted. 

There was no doubt as to her flight, or its purpose. The 
inner room was locked, and the key taken away ; the outer 
room was neatly swept and garnished ; everything was in its 
place. Gaston’s bureau was locked ; the glazed cabinet in 
which he kept his cherished collection of books— not large, 
but so carefully chosen ; chosen as poverty chooses its treas- 
ures, one by one, deliberately, anxiously— this, too, was lock- 
ed, and every book on its shelf ; and on the table lay a letter 
addressed to Durand ; 

“Dear Philip, dear Brother,— I am going to look for 
my husband. Have no fear for me. Heaven will pity and 
protect my wretchedness. I shall be about all day and every 
day seeking for my beloved ; but I shall come back here at 
night for shelter and rest, if jpossible. If I do not come back 
after dark you may know that my wanderings have taken 
me too far afield. But you need have no fear. Of one thing 
you may be sure— while my reason remains I will not destroy 


UNDER THE RED FLAG. 


78 

myself. I will be true to the teaching of my childhood, and 
God will give me grace to bear my troubles. 

“ Do not let one thought of me distract you from your 
duty of protecting Rose and her baby. If she asks about me, 
tell her that I am safe, in good hands, well cared for and pro- 
tected. Is not that the truth, when I am in the keeping of 
the Holy Mother and her blessed angels ? 

Ever lovingly, your sister Kathleen.” 

It was midnight ; the long dreary day was over, and she 
had not returned. Philip had crept upstairs, and looked 
into the empty room several times in the course of the day ; 
but there had been no sign of Kathleen’s return. He had 
questioned the landlord, who kept the hall-door locked and 
bolted in this time of panic ; but the man had seen nothing 
of Kathleen. 

It had been altogether a trying day. Rose was weak and 
somewhat feverish, and inquired anxiously every hour about 
Kathleen, Why chd not her sister come to see her ? Where 
was Gaston? Philip was sorely perplexed how to reply. 
Gaston was at the newspaper office, he faltered, on one 
occasion. 

“ But the newspaper was suppressed six weeks ago,” said 
Rose. 

“ Yes, but they are beginning again, now that times are 
better, and the government wilJ be restored. That’s what 
makes Gaston so busy.” 

“ But Kathleen— why does she desert me ? ” 

“ She is not very well, dear. It is only a cold ; but it is 
better for her to keep her room.” 

“ Yes, yes, let her nurse herself. Oh, I wish that I were 
well, and could go to her,” said Rose, with a troubled look. 

She was devoured by anxiety aoout Kathleen; and in 
spite of her husband’s tenderness, m spite of fussy Maman 
Schubert’s kindness, in spite even of tnat new and wonder- 
ful love, the maternal instinct, awakened in her mind by 
the infant that nestled at her side, like a bird under the 
parent wing, she could not overcome that feeling of fear and 
restlessness caused by her sister’s absence. 

“ Are you sure that she is not seriously ill ? ” she asked 
Philip, looking at him with fever-bright eyes. “ It is so 
unlike Kathleen to make much of a slight illness. And she 
must know that I am pining for her.” 

“Shall I go and fetch her?” asked Philip, making a 
movement towards the door. “ It is better for her health 
that she should stay in bed ; but if you want her so badly — ” 

“ No, no, not for the world. Give her my fondest love. 
Tell her to nurse herself. Give her baby’s love, too, Philip : 
I know this little creature is all love, though he was born m 
an evil time.” 


UNDER ^THE RED FLAG. 


79 


Poor little storm-bird ! ” murmured Philip, bending 
over the bed to kiss the little pink face, so soft, like some- 
thing very sweet and lovable, but not quite human. 

He was ashamed of himself for the lies he told so glibly. 
Yet he knew that it would be dangerous to tell his wire the 
truth — dangerous while her cheeks were flushed and her 
eyes glassy with fever. Maman Schubert had warned him 
that he must wade chin-deep in falsehood rather than allow 
his wife’s mind to become troubled. He must do anything in 
the world to soothe and comfort her. La Schubert herself was 
glib and inventive, and her presence had always a soothing 
effect. She brought Rose imaginary messages from her sister ; 
and pretendedio convey Rose’s replies. She dandled the baby, 
and cooked Philip’s dinner, and made the invalid’s broth, all 
with the liveliest air, and made light of conflagration and 
ruin, although with every hour the roar of cannon, the hiss 
of mitrailleuse, grew louder, fort answering to fort with 
sullen thunder, the sound of musketry close at hand. 

At midday a hideous noise resounded throughout the 
q^uarter. The houses rocked ; fragments of plaster fell from 
tne ceiling. 

What was that? The e^qflosion was too loud for any 
shell, however formidable. It was only the powder maga- 
zine at the Luxembourg, which had just been blown up. 
The Pantheon was expected momentarily. 

And still Maman Schubert, with nods and friendly smiles, 
assured her dearest Madame Durand, “ cette pauvre cherie,’^ 
that the Versailles troops were carrying everything before 
them. The Commune was surrendering without a blow. 
Order would be restored, Paris at peace, by Sunday morn- 
ing. 

“And we shall hear all the church-bells ringing for mass, 
and see the people in their Sunday clothes,” concluded 
Maman Schubert cheerily. 

So the long day and the evening wore through, and it 
was midnight, and there was no sign of Kathleen. 


She whose return was so eagerly awaited in the Rue Git 
le Coeur was not very far afield when the clocks chimed 
midnight. She had wandered about Paris all day, haun^tmg 
the gates of the prisons, inquiring for her missing husband 
of every one who seemed in the least likely to be able to 
answer. Had there been any new arrests made within the 
last three'days, and among the new arrests was there a young 
man, tall, slim, with dark-gray eyes and marked brows, 
handsome, a journalist ? At the gates of Mazas, at the Great 
and the Little Roquette, at Sainte Pelagie, at La Sante, the 
patient pilgrim appeared, weary, with garmpts whitened 
by the chalky dust of the hard dry roads which scorched her 
tired feet, drooping in body, yet brave of soul, questionmg, 


8o 


UNDER THE RED FLAG. 


seeking, watching, imploring, but finding no trace of the lost 
one. 

Night was fallmg before she turned away from the gates 
of La Sante, the model prison of Paris, where General 
Chanzy had been imprisoned for seven weary days at the be- 
ginning of the Commune — night had fallen as she walked 
slowly and wearily back to that part of the city which she 
knew best, where the Pont Neui spans the Seme, and the 
dark towers of Notre -Dame stand out strong and stern 
against the sky-line. Night had come, but not darkness. 
Tne crescent nioon shed her pale silvery light in the east, 
and the stars were golden in the deep calm azure of a cloud- 
less sky. But all at once that azure vault grew dark, and 
the stars vanished. Gigantic clouds of black smoke momited 
to the sky, and then descended earthward, covering the city 
with an impenetrable dome. Beneath this inky vault all 
was lurid. An awful light glared and glowed on the quays, 
on the bridges, in the broad space in front of the Hotel de 
Ville. Left bank and right bank blazed and glared ; here 
some stately public office, there a millionnaire’s mansion, 
sent up its tribute of flame to swell the funeral pyre of the 
doomed city. “ Chassepot and torch, shoot and burn ! ” was 
the order of the night. Yonder in the Rue de Rivoli they 
were fighting desperately. Kathleen ran across the street 
amidst a rain of bullets, stumbling over scattered corpses, 
deafened by the roar of the cannonade. Slowly, despair- 
ingly, she wandered up and down these dreadful streets, 
perpetually in danger, yet passing scathlessly through every 
peril. Now and then a savage, scowling face looked at her 
interrogatively, and then passed by. Sentinels questioned, 
and let her pass. There was no harm in her. She had a 
distracted look— a petroleuse who had proved of too weak a 
mind for that patriotic work, perhaps. Women are feeble 
creatures. This one’s head had been turned. Only an in- 
mate the more for the Maison des Fous. 

Amidst blood and fire she wandered to and fro, pausing 
whenever there was a knot of idlers at a corner to listen to 
their talk, or repeat her old inquiries. Had there been any 
new arrests within the last three days ? 

Arrests ? There were arrests every hour, a man told her. 
The gentlemen in power were getting rabid. Shoot and 
burn, that was the word. Murder and fire were their only 
notion for taking their revenge upon Versailles. Arrests, 
forsooth ! What was the use of talking about arrests ? The 
prisons were teeming with hostages, there was neither space 
nor provision for the herd of unfortunates ; and now the 
word had gone forth to shoot them down in the prison-yards, 
or to roast them alive in their cells. Rignault and Ferre, 
Serizier, Megy, these were not men to surrender tamely. If 


Under the red flag. 


8i 


these fiery stars were to be quenched, they would go down 
in a sea of blood. 

“ Anythi^g new ? ” repeated a man in a group that stood 
on the bridge watching the bui*ning of the Lyric Theatre, as 
if it had been a free representation, waiting for the Chatelet 
to take hr e on the other side of the wide, lurid street mo-' 
mentarily expecting the dark towers of Notre Dame to vomit 
hames— anything new? Yes, we live in stirring times. 
There is always something new. The V ersaillais have taken 
the Pantheon, the stronghold of the Commune, just as the 
Federals were gomg to blow it up. Milliere has been shot. 
That is new. Have you heard of the massacre of the Do- 
minicans? That is new. And Serizier has taken to his 
heels — Serizier, the colonel of the 101st battallion ; Serizier, 
the hero of Issy and Chatillons. The colonel is gone, and 
the battalion is scattered.” 

The Dominicans ! At that name Kathleen drew closer to 
the group, as near as she could to the speaker, gazing at him 
with wild, wide-open eyes. The Dominicans ! Almost the 
last words she had heard from her husband’s lips were an in- 
dignant protest against the ill-treatment of these good monks. 

“ I would shed my last drop of blood rather than that a 
hair of Father Captier’s head should be hurt by those devils,” 
he had said a few minutes before he left the house. 

She went close up to the man who had spoken, and who 
was now staling, open-mouthed, at the burning theatre. She 
laid her hand upon his arm. 

“Is that true?” she asked. “Has there been any harm 
done to the Dominican Fathers of the school of Albert the 
Great ? My husband was at school there, and he loves them 
as if they were his own flesh and blood.” 

“ Your liusband’s sons will have to find another school, 
citoyenne.” answered the man, with a cynical air. “ The 
Dominican school is sacked, and the shaven-polls have been 
given their passport for Paradise.” 

“ Murdered ! 

“Every one of them. Shot down like pheasants in a 
battue, this afternoon, yonder in the Avenue d’ltalie,” point- 
ing far away to the south. “ There is nothing left of the nest 
or of the magpies, citoyenne.” 

She clasped her hands before her face, and reeled against 
the parapet of the bridge. Nobody noticed her, or cared for 
her. The roof of the theatre was falling in — a shower of burn- 
ing fragments was blown across the dark water like a fiery 
rain. On the other side of the river the glare, the smoke, 
the stench of burning was intensifying with every moment. 

“ Will there be anything left of Paris but dust and ashes 
when the sun rises ? ” asked one of the bystanders. 

Kathleen leaned against the bridge, motionless, speech- 
less, paralyzed by fear. Slie tried to think. But for some 


82 


UNDER THE RED FLAG. 


moments thought was impossible ; her brain was clouded, 
benumbed, frozen. Then came reflection. Gaston had said 
that he would die to save them, flght for them to the death, 
these good fathers, and thev had all been murdered, and Gas- 
ton was missing. He who nad given her such faithful love 
had abandoned her to desolation and despair. 

Was it likely that he would so abandon her, unless a 
higher duty claimed him? Was it likely that he would leave 
her for a space of four days in ignorance of his fate, unless lie 
were a prisoner — or unless he were dead ? Paris reeked with 
blood, every street was the scene of murder, and he was gone 
with the rest of those victims of whom the crowd spoke with 
such seeming lightness, as it looked on at the burning of the 
city as at the flreworks which conclude some grand fete. 

They were waiting for the conflagration to burst from 
yonder mighty pile, from painted window and tower and bat- 
tlement, from nave and transept, from clerestory and roof : 
Notre Dame was to be the bouquet. 

“ Tell me, sir,” said Kathleen, in a hoarse, half-strangled 
voice, “ was there any one else killed in the Avenue dTtalie 
—any one besides the Dominicans— any one who was in com- 
panv with the good fathers ? ” 

“Yes, there were a few understrappers, I believe, servants 
of the school.” 

“No one else?” 

“ What do I know ? The news has passed from mouth to 
mouth. There is no official bulletin, citoyenne. The Com- 
mune keeps these things quiet. It is only hearsay.” 

Only hearsay ? A ray of hope lit up the blackness of her 
soul. Only hearsay ! And how many wild stories had been 
told in Paris within the last week, how many horrors had 
been bruited about Avhich had been but bubbles of foul imag- 
ining ! The story of the bodies found in the church of Saint 
Laurent, for instance. The desecrated corpses exposed at the 
church-door, the supposed victims of priestly crime ; foul fic- 
tions invented to stimulate the populace to carnage and spo- 
liation. 

“ Is it far to the Avenue dTtalie? ” she asked. 

The bystanders answered carelessly, one saying one 
thing, one another, each and all absorbed in the awful rapt- 
ure of the scene, and caring not at all for individual needs 
and feelings. 

One o’clock struck from the clock-tower of Notre Dame. 
Kathleen was footsore, faint, her eyes burning with fever, 
her mouth parched with thirst. She looked down at the 
river, but the stream seemed to be running with liquid fire, 
not water. There was no fountain near. She must get on 
somehow without the longed-for refreshment of a cup of 
cold water. There was no use of asking for information 
here, where the news was only hearsay, where people an 


UNDER THE RED FLAG. 


83 

swered her carelessly. In the Avenue d’ltalie, on the scene 
of this hideous crime, if the thing were true, she must more 
easily learn the actual facts— who had fallen, how many. 
There she might learn the worst. 

She crossed to the left hank of the river, and began her 
pilgrimage of despair. The distance was long, every step 
was weariness and pain, after her day’s wanderings. All 
the length of the Boulevard St. Michel, along which the 
ambulance-wagons were passing in dismal procession, 
crimson with blood. Under their scanty covering were 
heaped a confused mass of corpses. The dead wer^ being 
carried away by wagon-loads. On and on, past a barricade 
at which the men of the quarter were v/orking, old gray- 
headed men among them, men who only wanted to die 
peacefully at home with wife and children, and who, know- 
ing that death was inevitable, stuck heroically to their post. 
On and on, till the blaze of the conflagation, the roar of the 
flames, seemed to be left behind. But not the dull thunder 
of the cannonade, the sharp crack of pistol-shots. Carnage 
was audible on every side. 

Blood everywhere — the pavement was stained with it, 
the doors and door-posts were splashed with it, the gutters 
ran with it. Refuse of all kinds littered the road; butt- 
ends of muskets, fragments of belts, tails of coats, strips of 
blouses, caps, cartouch-boxes, shoes ; and here, on the open 
space in front of a barricade, the soldiers who had eaten 
their soup had laid calmly down to sleep by the side of the 
Main, the living mingled with the dead. Kathleen looked at 
the sleepers shuddering in the cold, clear moonlight. The 
clouds had drifted away, and that scene of carnage was 
steeped in silvery light. Impossible to pass that spot with 
feet undyed in blood, impossible to avoid seeing those dead 
faces. There, with arms thrown wide apart and face turned 
to the sky, calm, proud even in death, lies the young lieu- 
tenant of artillery whom Kathleen remembered to have seen 
in the early morning, sitting astride a cannon, thoughtful, 
with arms folded, and a face prophetic of doom. Yes, it is 
he and no other. His vest is open, as he flung it apart when 
the victors called upon him to surrender. His heart is one 
wide, bloody wound. All the gladness and pride of youth 
have welled out in that purple stream. 

No lack of traffic upon the boulevard or in the street, al- 
beit the night is far advanced towards morning. The omni- 
buses are going again— those useful omnibuses, the luxury 
of the poor— but their fares are not the living, but the dead. 
They carry a ghastly load of blood-stained corpses piled at 
random, thrust in helter-skelter. There are not vehicles 
enough for this dismal traffic. Railway-wagons, breaks, all 
are pressed into the funeral service. Men with sleeves 


UNDER THE RED FLAG. 


U 

turned up collect the dead, the hideous train moving slowly 
from barricade to barricade. 

One man stands looking witli horror at his naked arms, 
steeped up to the shoulders in blood. “ Are there no foun- 
tains hereabouts?” he asks of the crowd. Yes, fountams, 
rivers of water are needed to purify this Paris, drowned in 
the blood of her children. 

It is deep in the night, but the stillness of night is not 
here. Men, women, families are grouped in the doorways. 
No one knows where the conflagration will end, how near 
the carnage may come ; no man knows if he and his dear 
ones will see the daylight above the roofs and steeples of 
eastern Paris. Heavily, drearily the wagons go by with 
their silent burden. This may be called the nighb watch of 
the slain. On the Boulevard d’ Italic the insurgents have 
erected a monster redoubt, a fortification in triple stages, 
with trenches, loopholes, tunnels, defended at first by five 
hundred men. The defenders have dwindled to five, but 
these five will not yield. Their fortress is bombarded, tlie 
adjoining houses are in flames ; but still the five refuse to 
surrender, and after a deadly fight, that has lasted thirty- 
nine hours, they are taken and shot by the Versaillais. 

Such conflicts, as bloody as resolute, have been enacted 
all over Paris in the day that is not yet old. And now the 
moonlit hours, the calm of night, are given to the gathering 
up of the dead. Victors and vanquished lie cheek by jowl 
on the stones of Paris ; hecatombs sacrificed to discord and 
civil war. The red flag flies yet here and there above the 
carnage, the bloody ensign of a bloody reign. 


CHAPTER X. 

WIDOW, D. 

It is morning, dim, early morning, dawn pink and pearl- 
colored above the housetops, an odor of verdure, of lilacs 
and acacias, in the fresh, sweet air ; and Kathleen wanders 
up and down the Avenue dTtalie, always coming back to 
that house which has been used as a prison by Citizen Seri- 
zier, the leader of the 101st battalion. From one and from 
another, from manv informants, who all seemed to tell their 
story differently, she has gathered the history of the mas- 
sacre. She has heard how those harmless Dominican 
Fathers were hunted down, slaughtered like sheep in the 
shambles. It is after much questioning that she hears from 
a woman in one of the houses opposite the prison that there 
was another victim, one who was neither Dominican nor 
subordinate of the Dominican school— a young man, hand- 


UNDER THE RED FLAG, 


85 

some, with dark hair and eyes. He would have escaped in 
the melee,, only he lost time in trying to save Father Captier, 
the mior ; and it was only when the prior had fallen, when 
the fathers had been shot down all along the street, that 
this noble youth had turned to fly. And then, like a young 
antelope, he rushed through the savage crowd. He would 
have got olf even then, perhaps, if it had not been for a 
petroleuse, a veritable sne-devil, who gave the view-halloo, 
and rushed after him with half a dozen ruflians. He fell at 
the corner of a side street — that new street to the left yonder 
—the woman thought. 

Kathleen listened to the woman’s story, questioning her 
closely at every stage. She was so calm in her white despair, 
she listened and pondered the details of the tragedy with 
such a tranquil air, that one could have hardly guessed that 
each word was a deathblow. 

“ Do you recognize this young man as any one belonging 
to you?” asked the woman, compassionately. 

She was a seamstress, who cared neither for Peter nor 
Paul, a decent person, who had descended from her attic in 
the roof to see what this new dawn was bringing to I^aris— 
deliverance or death. She was not one of those furies who 
had stood at their windows shrieking and applauding during 
the butchery. 

“ I believe he was my husband.” 

“ Heavens, that is sad ! ” 

“ Whose fault was it? Whose work the massacre ? Can 
you tell me that ?” 

“ They say hereabouts that it was Serizier, Colonel Se- 
ri zier. He Avas at the head of it all. He ordered the Domin- 
icans and the others to be brought here ; he ordered them 
to be shot ; he Avas there, in the midst of the massacre, direct- 
ing his men, encouraging those vile Avomen who were even 
more savage than the Federals ; his OAvn hand fired upon 
those helpless priests ; he mocked them with abusive 
epithets ; he was pitiless, devilish, murder incarnate. You 
look ready to sink with fatigue,” said the seamstress, moA^ed 
with pity for Kathleen, whose eyes Avere fixed and glassy as 
the eyes of death ; “ come up to my room and rest ; it is a 
poor- place, but you are Avelcome. And T can give you a cup 
of coffee and a bit of bread ; it is not so bad as in the siege.” 

“Not so bad? the streets were not droAvned in blood 
then,” said Kathleen. “ Ko, you are very good, but I am not 
tired,” Avith a ghastly smile. “I Avill go and look at the 
corner Avhere he fell. Stay, what did they do Avith the 
bodies?” 

“ The Versaillais came an hour after and carried them 
all away.” 

“ Where— Avhere ? ” gasped Kathleen. 

But the woman could not tell her. Among so many 


86 


UNDER THE RED FLAG, 


wagon-loads of dead, who could tell, who cared, whither one 
particular batch had been taken ? Perhaps they had all been 
carried to that gaping chasm Ijehind the chapel at Pere la 
Chaise, into which the Federal corpses were flung en masse 
after the battle of Asnieres, The seamstress had seen that 
common grave, sixty corpses waiting for recognition, a sight 
to freeze one’s blood. 

Kathleen left her, and walked v/earily to that side street, 
a narrow, shabby street : doors and windows were all closed ; 
most of the houses had an evil aspect. There was no one 
standing about whom she could question. 

A few paces from the corner of the street, at the foot of a 
lamp-post, she saw the spot where the victim had fallen. A 
pool of blood had stained the summer dust. It was dry now, 
but she could see how the corpse had lain m blood and mire. 
The figure had printed its outline on the ground. There was 
no other trace of the massacre about. One victim, and one 
only, had fallen here. 

She knelt beside that awful stain ; she watered it with 
her passionate tears, the first she had shed throughout her 
pilgrimage of two-and-twenty hours. The church clocks 
were striking four. Yesterday morning at six she had left 
the Rue Git le Coeur. And now she had come to the end of 
her journey; she had found her resting-place. She knelt 
alone,. unnoticed, with her hands clasped over her face, pray- 
ing, first for her beloved, for the repose of his soul ; then fol- 
lowed a prayer less pure, less Christian, for revenge upon 
his murderer, the destroyer of her happiness. 

Who was the murderer? Kot the blind, mad mob, not 
even the devilish woman, the petroleuse, lashed into crime 
and murder by the^ scourges of insurgent tyrants. Serizier, 
the man in authority, the wretch who brought all those 
good fathers from their peaceful seclusion to the jail and the 
shambles. It was Serizier of whom she thought when she 
prayed for vengeance. 

“Let it come, O Lord ; long or late, let thy thunder come 
and strike him as he struck them ! Let thine hour of ven- 
geance be sure and swift ! Lo, here, looking up to Thee, I swear 
never to know rest or respite till I have tracked him to his 
doom ! ” 

Serizier, colonel of the 101st battalion. She wanted to 
know more about him— whither he had vanished after the 
carnage ; in what cellar or what garret this craven hound 
had hidden himself. 

When she had exhausted her passion in prayer, she calmed 
herself, and began to think. 

She was tired to the point of being fain to cast herself 
down upon the dusty road, and to lie there till sleep or 
death came to give her rest from the fever of her brain and 
the dull achmg of her bones. But she struggled heroically 


UNDER THE RED FLAG. 


87 

against this overpowering lassitude, and went back to the 
boulevard, and hobbled on till she came to a workman’s cafe 
that opened early for the accommodation of the neighbor- 
hood. Here she entered, and seated herself at a table near 
the door. The fresh morning air blew in upon her face as 
she sat there, and she felt as if that alone kept her from 
fainting. Never in all her life before had she entered such 
a place alone, or sat alone among such company. Her girl- 
hood and brief married life had been as closely guarded as 
if she had been a duchess. To sit alone among rough blouses 
iind Yersaillais soldiers in their stained uniforms was a new 
experience. 

She ordered some coffee, and the waiter brought her a 
roll and butter. She had eaten nothing except one piece of 
bread since she had left home. The coffee and the food re- 
vived her, and she was able to look about her, and listen to 
the eager voices of the blouses and soldiers, as they sat eat- 
ing and talking, smoking, drinking, all at once, as it seemed 
to her, with their elbows on the table, seen indistmctly in a 
cloud of tobacco. 

“ /ie, la per e., two little glasses of cognac, one of absinthe,” 
called a blouse. 

“ Garcou^ tine gomyne^'^ draAvled another blouse, with 
sublime affectation, imitating the expired, or temporarily 
obliterated, race of loplings, tlie creves of the Empire, 
known afterwards as gommeux., elegant consumers of ab- 
sinthe considerably diluted with gum arabic. And then 
came a name wliicli riveted Kathleen’s attention to the next 
table. The name was Serizier. They were discussing the 
delegate of the 13th arrondissement, the commander of the 
101st battalion. 

“ They say that he has decamped, this good Serizier, the 
hero of our battles,” said one of the men. 

“ It was time,” answered a soldier ; “ our cavalry were at 
the end of the street when cctte bete took to his heels. They 
liave been Iiunting for him ever since, but the rat has run 
into some hole where he is not easily found. We shall have 
liim, though. JVom cVun chien^ such butchers must not be 
allowed to escape. Those good Dominican Fathers! No, 
the canaille shall not get off 1 ” 

“ He is a man of yesterday, this Serizier, a creation of 
the 18th March, is he not ? ” asked the other. 

“ He is Communard crapvle among the Communards. He 
is a currier by trade, but he got into trouble under the 
Empire, and was a refugee in Belgium up to the 4th of 
September. He hates all priests with a diabolical ferocity, 
and has prided himself upon desecrating the churches by his 
brutal orgies. He is more tiger than man ; but we shall cut 
his claws and draw his teeth hvhen we find him.” 

“ When we find him, yes ! ” answered the other, lolling 


88 


UNDER THE RED FLAG. 


over the table, and eating his soup with an air of luxurious 
repose. 

His hands and face were alike blackened by gunpowder ; 
his hair was clotted with dust and blood. There nad been 
no leisure yet for the victors to make their toilet. 

“ You think he has taken the key of the fields ? ” 

“ I should say he was across the frontier by this time, or 
on board one of the American steamers at Havre. He would 
not let the grass grow under his feet.” 

“ Not so easy to get out of Paris, my friend. Look at 
Raoul Rigault. He tried to hide himself yesterday after- 
noon, but they unearthed him, and set him with his back to 
the wall — his favorite attitude for other people. And this 
Serizier is a marked man. He commanded twelve battalions 
at Chatillon and at Issy. All the army know him. He will 
never be able to pass our outposts unrecognized.” 

“ I hope not,” answered the other. “ They say that some 
of the Communist dogs— the leaders of the sheep— have 
provided themselves with balloons, and that, as soon as they 
have burned Paris, they mean to set sail for England or 
Belgium.” 

There was no more said about Serizier, and Kathleen left, 
after paying for her refreshment, and walked homeward 
slowly, feebly, in the bright, cool mornmg. The sun was 
rising over the heights beyond Paris. It was shining on 
the faces of the dead, on the dreadful crimson dye which 
stained the streets, on rags and tatters, and fragments of 
arms strewed thicker than autumn leaves on roadway and 
pavement. 

Some of the street lamps were still burning— a pale and 
sickly light in the glow and glory of the morning. The 
barricades were deserted. This side of Paris was in pos- 
session of the regular army, and a comparative quiet reign- 
ed— the quiet of death and desolation. But mighty masses 
of fiame and smoke yonder, as of a burning volcano, told that 
the confiagration still raged with unabated fury— the Rue 
dll Bac, the Rue de Lille, the public granaries, the Palace of 
•Justice : enough material there to last for a few good hours 
yet. 

Half way towards the Rue Git le Coeur, Kathleen met a 
melancholy procession. Forty Communards, men and women, 
prisoners, in chains, silent, with bent heads, in the 
midst of the soldiers who are leading them to the place 
where they are to be shot. No trial— no formula of 
any kind. They have been taken red-handed among 
the ruins they have made, in ditches, behind heaps of 
stones. They have been forced to fight, no doubt. The 
Commune would take no excuse. Her children must give 
her their hearts’ blood. To refuse was treason ; and death 
to all traitors was the cry of those last days. Rebellion, in 


UNDER THE RED FLAG, 


89 

her death-a^ony was merciless. “As good one death as 
another,” said the sheep, as they went to the barricades ; 
and they worked and drank—they were passing liberal with 
their strong drinks, these Communards leaders— and they 
fought with the desperate courage of men who knew that 
death was certain either way. 

And now, meekly as they obeyed their leaders, they suf- 
fer themselves to be led to their doom. Not theirs the 
brains that hatched rebellion ; not theirs the pockets that 
were filled by pillage and theft ; not theirs the profligate 
orgy or the brief spell of power; but theirs the penalty- 
death. 

It was nine o’clock when Kathleen toiled slowly up the 
staircase, and knocked with tremulous hand at her sister’s 
door. That last portion of her pilgrimage had been the 
slowest of all. She had crawled along, half asleep, hardly 
knowing where she was or what she was doing. She had 
stumbled against the passers-by, and had been accused of 
drunkenness more than once by an enraged citizen. And 
now, as Maman Schubert opened the door, she fell into her 
arms, and sank from that matronly bosom to the floor in a 
dead faim. 

The door of the inner room— Rose’s bedroom— was ajar. 
The good Schubert lifted up Kathleen’s lifeless form and 
laid it on the sofa. She ministered to her with the skilful- 
ness of an experienced nurse, and then ran to close the door 
of communication, lest Rose should hear too much. Already 
Rose had inquired several times for her sister. Was Kath- 
leen better? Would she be well enough to comedown to 
see Rose and the baby ? The mother had an idea that Kath- 
leen would find the little one gro’wn. He seemed to develop 
so quickly. He was all perfume and bloom, like an opening 
flower, llis breath was sweeter than summer roses. 

Durand was lying down on a mattress spread upon the 
floor of the tiny kitchen. He had taken his turn at the bar- 
ricade last night, and had received a bullet in the fleshy part 
of his arm. lie was feverish with the pain of his wound, 
devoured by perpetual thirst. 

“ You good soul, what would beconie of us without you ? ” 
he said, as he took a glass of water from Maman Schubert’s 
hand. “ How can we ever repay you ? ” 

“ My friend, do you think I need any payment ? ^ What 
has a lonely old woman with a small annuity to do in this 
world except care for her neighbors ? And Rose and Kath- 
leen are to me as my own daughters. Did I not see them 
when they first entered Paris, footsore and dusty, but so 
gentle and so pretty in their weariness ? Was I not the first 
to welcome them to this great city, which is now the city of 
death? Heaven help us! Lie still, and keep your mind 
tranquil, my friend, and as soon as I have given baby his 


UNDER THE RED FLAG. 


90 

bath— how he loves the water, the dear innocent !— I will 
come and put a fresh dressing on that poor arm.” 

Madame Schubert was surgeon, nurse, intermediary be- 
tween the sickroom and the outer world — everythmg, to the 
Durand household in their affliction. 

From his bed in the kitchen Philip heard Kathleen’s 
return— her feeble voice presently talking in low murmurs 
with Madame Schubert. She was safe ; she had returned. 
Through fire and smoke and carnage she had passed un- 
harmed. Here, at least, was a blessed relief— one burden 
lifted from their weary hearts. But he, the husband? What 
of him ? 

Kathleen told Madame Schubert the story of ner pilgrim- 
age ; told how she had knelt upon the blood-stained ground 
were her husband’s corpse had lain. But the good Schubert 
refused to be convinced, would not see any sufficient evidence 
of Gaston’s death. What did it come to, after all, this story 
which Kathleen had heard in the Avenue d’ltalie? A young 
man, nameless, with dark hair and eyes, had been killed 
with the good fathers. But why should that young man be 
Gaston Mortemar ? 

“ There are enough young men in France, my faith, with 
fair hair and eyes, ca ne manque pas^'' said Madame 
Schubert. 

“ Has my husband come home ? ” asked Kathleen. 

The good Schubert shrugged her shoulders and shook her 
head despondingly. 

“Alas, no!” 

“ Then he is dead — no matter how or where. He is dead ! 
Do you think that if he were hving he would forsake me ? ” 
asked Kathleen. 

“ He may be a prisoner.” 

“ Would to God it were so ! But I know ; there is some- 
thing here,” touching her breast, “ something stronger than 
myself, that tells me he fell yesterday — on that spot.” 

“ Kathleen,” called a voice from behind the closed door, 
“ Kathleen ! ” 

Rose had heard those murmurs in the next room, and had 
recognized Kathleen’s voice. 

Madame Schubert grasped Kathleen’s arm as she was go- 
ing to answer that call. 

“ Don’t go to her yet,” she said. “ You will frighten her 
with your ghastly face and your dust-stained gown. She was 
very ill yesterday, weak and feverish. She is weak to-day, 
but the fever is better. She must not be agitated in anyway. 
Go to your room, and wash and change your clothes, and 
come down presently looking bright and happy.” 

“ It will be easy,” said Kathleen, with a ghastly smile. 
“Yes, I understand.” 

‘ And not a word about Gaston or your wanderings. We 


UNDER THE RED FLAG. 


91 

told her nothing but lies yesterday — ^told her that you were 
in your own bed, ill with a cold. Don’t undeceive lier. She 
is so happy, poor soul, nursing her first baby. Yet, even in 
the midst of her new happiness, she was full of anxiety 
about you.” 

“ I will be cai’eful,” said Kathleen. “ I think I am getting 
used to sorrow. I ought to be able to hide it.” 

She obeyed Madame Schubert in every particular, and 
came back in less than an hour, fresh and bright, in her 
clean cotton gown and black silk apron, her lovely hair 
brushed to silky softness, and coiled in a smooth chignon at 
the back of her head. She smiled as she kissed Rose. She 
sat beside the bed and rocked the baby on her knees, and 
talked to him, and cooed at him, trying to awaken some 
faint ray of intelligence in the little pink face, which seemed 
to the mother to be full of soul. 

“ Do you think he has grown ? ” asked Rose, fondly. 

I think he is wonderfully improved since the day before 
yesterday,” answered Kathleen. 

“ Improved ! ” Rose felt inclined to resent the word. 
Could there be room for improvement m a being so perfect 
as that child had been from the very first hour of his life ? 
But Kathleen had vague memories of an unlovely redness 
and spottiness in the infant’s earliest idea of a complexion, 
and the soft, rosy tints of to-day seemed to her^a marked ad- 
vance in baby’s developement. 

Rose lay with her face turned towards her sister, her 
hand in Kathleen’s hand, perfectly happy. Happy in the ful- 
ness of her love, albeit fort still answered fort with sullen 
thunder, and cannon and mitrailleuse, chassepot and revol- 
ver, still made deadly music in the streets. There was peace 
here for Rose Durand in the narrow circle of home. She hacf 
suffered all anxieties about the outside world to be lulled to 
rest by Madame Schubert’s cheerful assurances. And then, 
since the birth of the Commune, Paris had grown accus- 
tomed to the sound of bombardment, to the smoke of cannon. 
Polichinelle had made his jokes, the merry-go-rounds had re- 
volved, the barrel-organs and fifes and drums had sounded 
cheerily in the Champs Elysees, albeit Versailles was bom- 
barding Paris. The roar of guns, the noise and havoc of war, 
had become the everyday sounds of the city. Rose, lying in 
her curtained bed, windows closed and muffled, hardly knew 
that the guns to-day sounded louder and nearer. 

“Philip will go no more to the barricades,” she told 
Kathleen. “ He was wounded in the shoulder yesterday— a 
very slight wound, praise to Heaven ! but enough to prevent 
his fighting any more.” 

Kathleen heard with a shudder, remembering that file of 
prisoners, with fettered limbs and downcast eyes, pale, de- 
spairing, submissive. She had heard people say that all who 


UNDER THE RED FLAG. 


92 

had carried arms against the Republic would be served tnus. 
“ Passes par les armes / ” The phrase was familiar enough 
now. A short shrift, and your back agauist a wall, citizen, 
vour waistcoat open, so ! and eight muzzles pomted at your 
heart. 

“Where is Gaston?” said Rose, presently. “Maman 
Schubert said he was at the office all yesterday. IRs news- 
paper is to be revived now that Paris is more tranquil, she 
told me. Are you glad of that, Kathleen ? I hope he will not 
preach revolution any more. We have had enough of the 
Commune.” 

“ Yes enough— more than enough,” said Kathleen, her 
pale lips quivering as she turned away her head. 

All that day the sisters spent together, Kathleen devoting 
herself to Rose and the baby, smiling upon both, speaking 
hopeful words ; but after dark, when Rose had fallen asleep, 
Kathleen stole away from the sick room just as Madame 
Schubert re-entered, after having attended to her own home 
affairs. Before Madame Schubert had time to ask her a 
question, Kathleen was gone. She ran up to her own room, 
put on her neat little bonnet and ‘shawl, her thick black 
veil, and then back to those terrible streets, to the stifling 
smoke, the glare of the conflagration, the tramp of soldiery, 
the cry of “ Stand, or I Are ! ” 

The struggle was over in the centre of Paris. The in- 
surgents had retired to Pere la Chaise, Menilmontant, Belle- 
ville, the Buttes Chaumont. The huge storehouses of Vil- 
lette filled half the sky with a lurid flame, across which flash- 
ed the swift white light of the cannon. The Hotel de Ville 
stood sharply out against the sky of flame and moonlight — a 
ruin, grand as any wreck of Roman greatness ; airy columns, 
fairy arches, doorways without rooms, spectral corridors, 
cornices of delicate tracery ; and, above all, unharmed, in big 
golden capitals, the legend, “Liberty! Equality ! Fraternity r 

And still roars the demoniac thunder of the cannon. Mont- 
martre, from its superior height, rains death and destruction 
upon Belleville and La Roquette. Belleville and La Roquette 
reply with mitrailleuse and shell. 

“Any news— any news of Colonel Serizier?” Kathleen 
asks of a group of women at a street corner. 

But they do not even know who Serizier is. They are 
full of their own troubles, their own fears. One of these 
weeps for a husband whom she has not seen for four days : 
called out against his will— he, the peaceable father of a 
family— to go and work and fight and die at the barricades. 

“ Ah, ma honne ! ” she says to Kathleen, with streaming 
eyes, “the Commune was very cruel; and now they say 
Monsieur Thiers will be cruel too. Those foolish people have 
pulled down his house, and that will not help to arrange 
matters.” 


VNDER TkE RED ELAC. 

Serizier ? No ; no one in the streets knew anything about 
Serizier. 

What was this dark rumor which the loiterers in the 
streets repeated to each other with awe-stricken faces ? The 
hostages had been murdered at La Roquette three days ago, 
Slaughtered within the walls of the prison. The Archbishop 
of Paris, the Cure of the Madeleine, Monsieur Bonjean, the 
President— eighteen victims in all. 

Yes, it was true. True, also, that at five o’clock this after- 
noon, in the bright May sunshine, another band of hostages 
—priests, soldiers, civilians— to the number of fifty-two, had 
been done to death by a savage mob in the Rue Haxo, on 
the heights of Belleville ; but this new horror had not yet 
become town talk. 

It was one o’clock in the morning when Kathleen went 
home, worn out by wandering up and down the streets, 
standing at the corners or on the bridges listening to the pas- 
sers-by, to the people who stood at their doors ; but nowhere 
could she hear anjdhing that threw new light upon the trag- 
edy in the Avenue d’ Italic, or the wretch who had planned 
that bloody deed. 


CHAPTER XI. 

Kathleen’s avocation. 

WiiiT-SuNDAY. May on the threshold of June, the very 
dawn of summer ; but the sun, which hitherto has shone 
with pitiless, searching light upon scenes of death and hor- 
ror, shines no more. Stormy winds beat and bluster against 
that feeble old house in the Rue Git le Coeur, with a sound 
and fury as of thunder ; the cannonade of heaven takes up 
the cannonade of earth, and echoes it with twenty-fold pow- 
er. Tempestuous rain lashes the windows, like the spray 
from a seething ocean. The cannon of Montmartre thun- 
ders against the heights of Belleville and Menilmontant. 
The insurgents reply with savage fury, blind, reckless ; del- 
uging Pans with shells. 

And while the pitiless struggle still goes on upon the 
heights of Belleville, the day of reprisals has already begun 
for the insurgents. From Mazas they bring a hundred and 
forty-eight prisoners, hastily huddled into the prison yester- 
day. In the stormy Sunday morning, Whitsuntide morn- 
ing, they are marched to the cemetery of Pere la Chaise, 
among the trees and the flowers, and the marble monuments 
of the distinguished dead; and there, hard by that common 
grave, where the murdered archbishop and his companions 
lie in their bloody shrouds, the Federal prisoners are divid- 


UNITER THE RED FLAG, 


94 

ed into batches of ten, and shot to death. They die bravely, 
joining hands and crying, “ Long live the Commune ! ” with 
their last breath. 

In the prison of Little Koquette, at about the same hour, 
two hundred and twenty-seven insurgents meet the same 
doom ; not quite so boldly, for some of these, said an eye-wiL 
ness, were snivellers, and begged for mercy. 

The final hour has come ; those shells are verily the 
death-rattle of the Commmie. Thirty thousand men are said 
to be concentrated upon this point of Paris, where they have 
built up giant barricades, almost impenetrable fortresses, 
communicating with each other by underground passages, 
a wonder of rough-and-ready masonry and skill. They 
are held in this supreme hour by men of desperate courage, 
men who have sworn not to surrender. 

Two o’clock on that stormy Sabbath, and so far there has 
been neither rest nor respite. Cannon, mitrailleuse, chasse- 
pot, thundering, rattling, roaring, hissing ; but now, as the 
afternoon wears on, there comes intervals of silence. The 
cannonade pauses to draw breath. The sounds of battle 
seem more remote— they die away in the distance. Then 
silence. 

Silence ! Are they all dead ? 

This is Sunday, the day when the laborer rests from his 
toil; but to-day there has been only one laborer, and his 
name is Death. 

Evening, and for the first time for many weeks and many 
days no more cannon. Oh, happy silence, silence of peace ! 
Or should we not rather say silence of death ? 

A column of six thousand ppsoners who have surren- 
dered at Belleville slowly defile along the boulevard ; and 
this is verily the end. Yes, the cup of desolation has been 
drained to the dregs. There have been the sword to slay 
and the dogs to tear, and the fowls of the heaven and the 
beasts of the earth to devour and destroy, as in the day of 
the prophet ; only, the dogs have been human beasts ; and 
the whirlwind of the Lord has gone forth with fury, a con- 
tinuing whirlwind, and it has fallen with pain upon the head 
of the wicked, and on the head of the good and just and in- 
nocent and gentle also. 

The sacred month of May, month dedicated to the Holy 
Mother of God, was over— month of May never to be forgot- 
ten by the French people. May, which has left its indelible 
mark upon the city of Paris— and now all the gates of the 
city were opened, and the world came to see the work of de- 
struction. English, Americans, foreigners of all kinds went 
about, looking at the ruins, as at Pompeii or Herculaneum, 
criticising, examining, somewhat disappointed that the havoc 
was not more universal. 

On the 7th of June came the funeral procession of Mon. 


UNDER THE RED FLAG. 


95 

signor Darboy, the third Archbishop of Paris murdered 
within a quarter of a century. Under a gray and smiless sky 
the car, with its long train of mourners, soldiers, people, 
solemnly, silently, defiled along the quays, past the still 
smouldering ruins of palaces and mansions. No roll of 
drums, no funeral music broke that awful silence ; only the 
rhythmical tread of the soldiers, the hollow rumble of gun- 
carriages. In the dumbness of a broken-hearted city, a city 
reeking with blood newly shed, the martyr was carried to 
his tomb in the great cathedral — last stage of a journey that 
had known so many dismal halting-places— from prison to 
prison, and then to the common grave at Pere la Chaise, 
from there to the bed of state in the archiepiscopal palace, 
and now to the final resting-place among the historic dead. 

In the Rue Git le Coeur life had resumed its wonted way, 
save for one empty place. Rose was again astir, the careful 
manager, the attentive wife, nursing her baby, busy with 
her domestic work, cleaning, cooking, keeping the little 
apartment as neat and bright as a palace. There were 
flowers on the window-sill again, a bunch of flowers on the 
table at which Philip wrote or read, a bouquet of lilies of 
the valley, pure, spotless, telling no tale of a ruined city, a 
humiliated and impoverished nation. Within, by the domes- 
tic hearth, all was peace. Philip’s arm was slowly mend- 
ing. He was able even to work a little at the famous carved 
sideboard in his workshop, or to bring one of the panels into 
his wife’s sitting-room, to sit there by the open window, 
chiselling a group of fruit, bird, or fish, and whistling softly 
to himself as he worked, while Rose sat in her rocking-chair 
crooning to her sleeping babe. 

And Katheen, the widowed, the heart-broken, what was 
her life in these days of restored peace ? She was very quiet. 
She bore her sorrow with a silent resignation which was 
more pathetic than loud wailings or passionate tears. But 
Rose would have liked better to see her weep more. That 
bloodless face, those fixed and hollow eyes, that slow and 
heavy step — the step which had once been so light and swift 
upon the stair— those long intervals of silence and apathy, 
were not these the indications of a broken heart? 

Rose Durand did all in her power to comfort the mourner. 
She tried to persuade her sister to surrender the apartment 
on the upper story, and to occupy a little room off Philip’s 
work-shop— a mere closet; but Rose could furnish it, and 
make it a pretty nest for her darling ; and then Kathleen 
would be her child again, always under her watchful care. 
She would share all their meals, live with them altogether ; 
and the company of the little one, who showed himself full 
of intelligence, would soothe and amuse her. 

“You are very good, dear,” answered Kathleen meekly, 
when this scheme was pressed upon her ; “ you and Philip 


UNDER THE RED EL AC. 


96 

have been all goodness to me. But I like to live alone, mst 
now. I am not fit company for any one. And again, if— if 
— ” with a profound sigh, “ if — he should come back, and 
find his room altered, his books disturbed— it would seem as 
if I had not really loved him.” 

Rose was silent. Till this moment she had supposed that 
Kathleen was absolutely convinced of her husband’s death ; 
that the black gown she wore was the sign of hopeless 
widowhood ; but these words told of a lingering hope, and 
after this Rose no longer urged her sister to give up the 
apartment. It was better she should go on hoping until the 
thin thread of hope wore out, than that she should sink all 
at once into the gulf of an absolute despair. Better, too, 
that she should have the daily occupation of arranging 
her rooms, dusting Gaston’s books, opening a volume now 
and then and lookmg at a page, as if it held his own words. 
There were pages of Musset’s poetry which seemed to speak 
to her with her husband’s voice, so often had he read the 
lines to her in their brief married life. She knew all his 
books, and knew the measur e of his love for each. 

Every morning she put a little bunch of flowers on his 
writing table by the window. And yet in her heart of hearts 
she was convinced that he was dead, and that it was his 
blood she had seen staining the dusty ground in the street 
off the Avenue d’ltalie. And then, wdren this work of dust- 
ing, polishing, and arranging everything was done, work 
over which she lingered lovingly,’ she would put on her 
little black bonnet, with a thick crape veil over her face, and 
go out and wander about the streets and the quays, and 
loiter on the bridges, hearing all that could be heard of the 
public news. People respected that black gown and bonnet, 
and the thick mourning veil. She was recognized as one 01 
the many mourners who had been left behind after that 
awful trial of blood and fire had rolled over Paris. Lonely 
as she was, young, beautiful, no one molested her. She went . 
from place to place, secure in the majesty of her desolation. 

She saw the long files of insurgent prisoners led along the 
streets, fastened together by their elbows, with lowered 
heads, still fierce and shuddering from the bloody battle, 
guarded by a cordon of soldiers. She saw the exasperated 
crowd flinging itself savagely upon the victims of their 
leaders’ folly, trying to break through the cordon of soldiers, 
the women more furious than the men, striking at the priso- 
ners with their umbrellas, crying, “ Death to the assassins ! 
To the fire with the incendiaries ! ” 

When some poor panting wretch, exhausted by fatigue, 
tottered and fell, and was picked up by the gendarmes and 
put in one of the vehicles of relief which followed the con- 
voy, there was a howl of fury from the mob. 

“No, no,” they cried, “ slioot him on the spot ! ” 


UNDER THE RED FLAG. 


9.7 

And as the dismal train passed through the villages, on 
the quiet country roads, there was the same chorus of in- 
sults and execrations, a torture that knew no cessation till 
the prisoners reached the camp at Satory, where they had the 
naked earth for their bed, and the sky for their shelter. Per- 
haps some among these pilgrims of the chain may have assis- 
ted in that other procession on the 27th of May, when Emile 
Gois and his myrmidons drove the priests and the gendarmes 
to the place of butchery in the Rue Haxo. 

The day of reprisals had come, and the day was bitter. 
And the cry of Paris is like the voice of the daughter of Zion 
that bewaileth herself, that spreadeth her hands, saying, 
“ Woe is me now, for my soul is wearied because of mur- 
derers ! ” 

In all her wanderings, those loiterings under the limes and 
the maples, on the boulevard, or on a bench in the Champs 
Elysees, where the old air of gayety began once more to eii- 
liven the scene, Kathleen had as yet heard nothing of 
the missing Serizier. The people whom she questioned were 
either densely ignorant— they had never heard of the man- 
or they remembered him vaguely as one of those heroes of 
the hour, a shoddy Achilles^ who had strutted in a gaudy 
uniform and played the soldier in a passing show ; or they 
were hidiffereiit, shrugged their shoulders, believed that 
Serizier had been killed on one of the barricades at Belleville 
yonder, or that he had been shot at Mazas with a gang of in- 
surgents. 

At last, however, one tender June evening, when the 
storied windows of Notre Dame flung broken colored lights, 
like scattered jewels, upon the placid bosom of the Seine, 
hard by the Morgue, which lay low in the shadow yonder, 
like the black hull oi some slave-ship, Kathleen, standing by 
the loAV parapet, listening to the deei>toned harmonies of the 
distant organ, heard two men talking of Serizier. 

They had known him, evidently ; he had been one ol 
their intimates at some period of his career ; but they were 
not talking of him with any warmth of friendship. The man 
had been too great a brute to conciliate even his own class. 

“ He got off, sure enough,” said one. “ He was cleverer 
than Theophile Ferre^ or Raoul Rigault, or Megy, and the 
rest of them. I met him after dark, on the 25th of May, in 
the Place Jeanne d’Arc. He was in a fever of fright, poor 
wretch, shaking from head to foot with agitation and excite- 
ment. After allj there is a difference in killing and being 
killed, and Serizier thought his turn had come. His boots 
and trousers were red with the blood of the Dominicans, 
and he complained of having to wear a uniform that was 
likely to betray his identity. He was colonel of the 101st 
battalion, you may remember, and had been very proud of 
his uniform— bull-dog that hq was. Well, he had never done 


98 


UNDER THE RED FLAG. 

me^any good turn that 1 could remember ; but one is glad to 
hide a hunted beast when the hounds are close upon liim ; 
so I told him I had a married sister living in the Rue Chu/- 
teau des Rentiers, and that I could get him shelter m her 
lodging, which was on the gromid-lloor, at the back, looking 
into a walled yard— a safe kennel for any dog to hide in. 
He jumped at the offer, and 1 took him to my sister’s place, 
gave him a supper, and a bit of carpet to lie , upon, and a 
blouse and a pair of linen trousers m exchange for his fine 
feathers, and lent him a razor to cut off his military mus- 
tache; and at break of day he left us, clean-shaved, and 
dressed like a workman.” 

“ And you conclude that he got out of Paris that morn- 
ing ? ” asked the other man. '' 

“ He was a fool if he did not, having a fair chance.” 

“ The question is, whether he had a chance. That bull- 
dog muzzle of his would not be easily forgotten, and the gov- 
ernment was hard on his track on account of the slaughter 
of the Dominicans, which really was a little too much : even 
we of the International thought he had gone too far. 1 
should thhik it would be easier for him to hide in Paris just 
then.” 

“ Perhaps ; but there has been plenty of time since for 
him to get clear off. I dare say he is living by his craft as a 
currier in one of the big provincial towns. He would have 
to live by his trade, for I know he carried no money with 
him when he made off that morning.” 

“ A currier ! Here was something gained, at least,” Kath- 
leen thought. Until this moment she had not known the 
original avocation of the warrior Serizier, the commandant 
of the famous 101st, the hero of Issy and Chatillon. A cur- 
rier ! Here was a falling off indeed for the Ajax of the gut- 
ter ! 

One of the big provincial towns ! Alas, this was indeed 
a vague clue. Rouen, Havre, Lyons, Tours, Rennes — the 
names of a dozen great cities came into Kathleen’s mind as 
she went slowly homeward, downcast and disheartened. He 
lived : that was something for her to know. He lived to ex- 
piate lais crime, to suffer as she suffered, to render blood for 
iDlood. Her life, her brain, her heart should be devoted to 
the task of finding him ; her hand should point him out to 
the law he had outraged. 

All that night— the soft summer night, full of the mur- 
muring of leaves— even here in desolated Paris, where the 
ruined houses stood up blank and black, with shattered win- 
dows, through which the moonlight shone and the June 
winds blew; a handful of dust, a fragment of crumbling 
mortar, falling everv now and then, as the zephyrs touched 
the broken walls — all that night Kathleen lay broad awake, 
staring at the casement opposite her bed; and when day 


UNDER THE RED FLAG. 


99 


da^vned — the sweet summer dawn that came so soon—she 
sprang up, and began to wash and dress. Her plan was 
formed. 

One of those two men had said there was safer hiding for 
such as Serizier in Paris than outside Paris ; the other had 
said that he had no money upon him at the time of his sup- 
posed flight. Without money, how could he have taken a 
long journey, unless he had walked, like the two sisters? 
But the colonel of the 101st — the man who had wallowed in 
feasting and drunkenness, who had held his impious orgies 
in the violated churches of Paris — was doubtless too luxu- 
rious a person to tramp for weary leagues along the- white, 
dusty roads, under the pitiless sun. No; he would stay in 
Paris. He would think himself safe in his workman’s blouse, 
among workmen, most of them members of the Interna- 
tional Society, that fatal association which had sown the 
seeds of anarchy all over Europe. Among these men the as- 
sassin would be safe ; they would not betray a brother, even 
were he known as the murderer of the helpless. 

She was in the streets before any of the shops were 
opened, before workaday Paris— no sluggard, whatever her 
vices— was beginning to stir. This was sheer restlessness, for 
she could do nothing without the help of her fellow-men. At 
eleven o’clock she was in a small office in the Marais,— an 
office to which she had gone with Rose years ago, soon after 
their first coming to Pans, to inquire for work. It was a reg- 
istry for servants, for clerks in a small way, and for shop- 
men. Here she asked how many curriers’ workshops there 
were in Paris. She thought there would be several— ten 
perhaps, or even twenty. ^ ^ ^ 

The agent gave her a trade-directory, opened it for her at 
a page headed “Curriers.” There were two hundred and 
thirty-two curriers in Paris — two hundred and thirty-two 
workshops, at any of which the man Serizier might be plying 

his trade. . „ . . - .1 

Hardly strange, taking this fact into consideration, that 
the law had hitherto failed to touch this offender ; more es- 
pecially as the government, though ready to administer stern 
lustice upon such of the Communist assassins who came in 
its way, did not give itself very much trouble m hunting 
down those who had made clean off. 

And then, again, the harmless Dominicans were solitary 
men. There was no wife or child, no friend or sweetheart to 
avenge thstyt 

“ It will be longer than I thought,” Kathleen said to her. 
self, as she stood at a desk in the shadow at the back of the 
little office, copying that long list of names and addresses. 

Two hundred and thirty-two workshops. There^were 
names of streets which she had never heard of— dptricts, 
suburbs, of whose very existence she was ignorant, ine 


lOO 


UNDER THE RED FLAG. 


work of copying those addresses alone occupied her for nearly 
two hours ; she was so careful to write every address cor- 
rectly, to be sure of every name. 

W hen her task was done she gave the agent two francs 
for the use of book, ink, and papei’ and asked him where she 
could buy a good map of Pans. lie directed her to a shop hi 
the next street, where she got what she wanted ; and this 
done, she went home. ...» . . 

Rose was singing over her l)aby, singing in the sunlit wm- 
dow, bright Avith tiowers. Philip had fitted the Ayiiidow’’s 
with window-boxes of bis own designing— Swiss rustic, AAdiat 
you will — constructed out of odd pieces of rough oak, the ref- 
use of his cabinet-work. Rose Avas the gardener, Avho bought 
and planted the fiowers, and tended these humble gardens 
day Dy day; and never had bloomed finer carnations than 
Rose’^i Gloire de Malmaison yonder, or lovelier roses than her 
Marechal Niel. " . . 

Durand was at work in his carpenter’s shop hard by, with 
a sheaf of chisels, carving a bird whose breast-feathers seemed 
ruffled Avith the summer-Avind, so full of life Avas the chisel- 
ling, What a happy home it looked in the July afternoon ! 
The tide of fire and blood had rolled by, and left this little 
household unscathed, untouched,' Nay, in the midst of death 
and doom the babe had been born, and the trinity of domestic 
love had been made perfect’ 

Kathleen sank down into a chair near her sister’s, sighing 
faintly in very weariness. 

“ My love, how tired you look ! ” said Rose, tenderly. 
“ Have you been far ? ” 

“No; only to the Marais.” 

Rose had of late abstained from all close questioning of her 
sister. She knew that Kathleen Avandered about the streets 
aimlessly, wearied herself Avith long Avalks that seemed utterly 
Avithout end or motive. But this idle Avandering might be 
one way of living doAvn a great grief. It Avas Avell, perhaps, 
to let the mourner take her oaaui way. Nothing is so oppressive 
as obtrusive sympathy. Rose sympathized, and said very 
little. 

At his Avite’s instigation Durand AA^atched the girl’s lonely 
Avalks on tAvo or three occasions ; saAV that she suffered no 
harm, went into no vile quarters, provoked no insult ; and 
after being assured of this. Rose Avas content to let her 
follow her OAvn devices. 

“ The angel ffi consolation may be leading her,” she said ; 
“ saints and angels know Avhat is best for her.” 

And in her high-strung faith as a Papist, Rose Durand 
believed that her sister’s pure spirit here on earth might be 
in communication Avith the soul of that mighty company 
which had gone before, that great cloud of witnesses hover-. 


UNDER THE RED FLAG. loi 

ing round us, invisible, impalpable— the spirits of the faith- 
ful departed. 

Kathleen sat silent, those dreamy eyes of hers gazing 
across the flowers to the blue cloudless sky. The dark- violet 
eyes seemed larger and more lustrous than of old, now that 
her face was pinched and thin ; but oh, so unspeakably 
sad ! 

“ Why were you not home at dinner-time, dear ? Have 
you had anything to eat since the morning ? ” 

“ I think not, - Kathleen answered, absently. 

“ And you went out so early ! I was at your door before 
six, and found you were gone. You must be faint for want 
of food.” 

“ I never feel hungry. I am a little tired, that’s all.?’ 

The boy had dropped off to sleep by this time. Rose laid 
him softly in his cradle, and then busied herself preparing a 
meal for her sister. 

She made some coffee in a little brown pot, which needed 
only a handful of burning charcoal to heat it. She brought 
out some Lyons sausage, a plate of salad, a hunch of crisp 
light bread, a roil of butter in a little covered dish half-full 
of ice. Everything in Rose’s domestic arrangements was 
fresh and clean and neat. The cloth she spread on the table 
was spotless damask, washed and ironed by her own 
hands. 

“ Comej pet,” she said, and coaxed her sister to the table, 
taking off her bonnet, smoothing the soft golden hair, kissing 
the pale brow, so full of gloomy thought. 

Kathleen took a little coffee, but ate nothing. She sat 
with her eyes fixed on vacancy, scarcely conscious of the 
meal that had been spread for her, quite unconscious of 
Rose’s face watching her. 

“ My dearest, if you don’t eat— if you go wandering about 
and fasting for long hours— you will be fit for nothing ; you 
will drop down in the streets ; you will be carried on to a 
hospital. 

Kathleen looked up at her with a startled expression. 

“ Yes, yes ; you are right,” she said, hurriedly, and with 
a sudden agitation, in tone and manner. “If I become too 
weak, ready to faint at every turn, I shall be useless— I can 
do nothing ; and I have so much to do. Yes, dear, I shall 
take some of this nice bread and butter. I want to be strong* 
I am a reed— a poor, feeble reed ; and I ought to be made of 
iron;” 

“ Only be reasonably careful of yourself, dear, and you 
will soon be strong again. Those long wanderings and long 
fastings must kill you if you go on with them. You ought to 
be careful of yourself, Kathleen,” added Rose, with tears in 
her eyes — for there were times when she felt as if it were 
but a question of weeks and days how long she might keep 


102 


UNDER THE RED FLAG. 


this idolized sister— “ you ought to be careful, for my sake 
and Philip’s. W e are both so fond of you.” 

“ Yes,’^ Kathleen answered, in a low voice, “ and for his 
sake.” 

She forced herself to eat, and did tolerable justice to the 
white sweet bread and the fresh salad. Her meals m her 
own apartment were less luxurious. A slice of dry bread, 
eaten standing, a handful of cherries and a crust, a cup of 
milk. She had hoarded her little stock of money ever smce 
Gaston’s disappearance. She held it ready for any expendi- 
ture that might help her in her scheme of vengeance. 

“ I want to be strong,” she said, quietly, when she had 
finished her meal. “ I have got some employment — a— a 
kind of place, to which I shall have to go very early every 
morning.” 

“ Indeed ! ” exclaimed Rose, sitting at work by the win- 
dow, moving the cradle with her foot. “ Why did you do 
that, dear?” 

“ I hardly know,” answered Kathleen, with her eyes on 
the ground. “ I thought it would be better for me to be em- 
ployed.” ' 

‘‘But I don’t think you are strong enough for employment 
of any kind, just yet, dear,” said Rose, anxiously. 

The idea seemed to her fraught with peril, with madness 
even. 

“ Oh, but I shall get stronger now that I have a motive, a 
settled purpose in life, a task to perform. You will see that 
I shall do so, Rose. Have no fear.” 

Her eyes brightened and flashed as she spoke— a hectic, 
fatal light. Rose thought. 

“ I hope whatever place you have taken that the work is 
very easy,” said the elder sister, after a pause. 

“ Oh, yes, it is easy enough— very easy ; in the open air 
mostly. You will see that my health will improve every 
day.” 

“ I shall be full of thankfulness if I see that ; and if the 
employment adds to your happiness.” 

“It will!” cried Kathleen, eagerly. “It will make me 
very happy, if I succeed.” 

; “ Dearest, I never like to question you about yourself,'’ 
said Rose, in a pleading tone, “ for I know there are heart- 
wounds which should never be touched. But I should be so 
glad if you would tell me frankly, fully, what you are going 
to do? ’’ 

“ I cannot, dear.” 

“ Cannot ! Oh, Kathleen, is not that hard between such 
sisters as you and me ? ” 

“ All my life has been hard since the 21st of May.” 

“ And I am to be told nothing? ” 

“Nothing more than I have told you already. I have 


UNDER THE RRD FLAG. lo^ 

taken upon myself an avocation which will oftige me to go 
out very early every morning ; to he out sometimes at dusk. 
I want you to understand this, and not to be uneasy when I 
am away from home.” 

“ I cannot help being uneasy. I am anxious about you 
every hour of the day. Why. cannot you stay at home, Kath- 
leen, and let me take care of you ? I could get you work that 
you could do in your own room ; sheltered, saf e^ protected 
from the pollution of the streets, from the hearing of foul 
language, from brushing shoulders vvith disreputable 
people.” 

“ I hear nothing • I feel no degradation. I think of noth- 
ing. am conscious of nothing, but my own business.” 

“ Is this business— respectable— worthy of a good Catho- 
lic?” 

“ Yes, it is respectable. There is warrant for it in the 
Scriptures.” 

Rose looked at her with acutest anxiety. That pale fixed 
face, the strange brightness of the eyes, suggested an exalta- 
tion of spirit, a state of mind which touched the confines of 
madness. And yet the girl’s voice was soft and gentle, the 
girl’s movements were quiet and deliberate. There was no 
wildness of gesture, no sign of actual unreason. Kathleen 
was terribly in earnest, that was all. 

From that hour the girl’s health seemed to improve ; both 
mentally and physically there was a change for the better. 
Her eye had a steadier light ; there seemed, less of exaltation, 
of feverish excitement. Her whole being seemed braced and 
strengthened as if by some heroic purpose. Yet there were 
times when the light in those steadfast eyes, the marble lines 
of the firmly set lips, were almost awful. 

“ What a woman that is, that sister-in-law of vours ! ” said 
Durand’s artist-friend, the gray-beard who had been one of 
the witnesses at the double wedding. “ That face would-be 
magnificent for Jael or Judith, for Charlotte Corday ^ 
Salammbo. That girl is capable of anything strange or 
heroic or deadly. She has the tenacity of a Redskin. 

Durand smiled a sad, incredulous smile. 

“ Poor child, how little you know her ! ” he answered. 
“You clever men are so easily led away by a fancy. Kath- 
leen is one of the gentlest souls I know. She adored her 
husband, and her grief at his death has turned her a little 
here,” pointing to his forehead. “But she is incapable of 
any violent act.” 

“ She is capable of a great crime in a great cause, as Char- 
lotte Corday was ; the gentlest of souls, she, till she took the 
knife in her hand to slay whom she deemed the scourge of 
her country. I am not led away by fancies, Durand. Faces 
are open pages to the eye of a painter. I can read that one, 
and know what it means.” 


104 


tjNDER THE RED FLAG. 


Philip toolsithis for the illusion of an habitual dreamer, 
and attached no weight to the opinion. Kathleen had given 
them no cause for uneasiness since she commenced her 
“avocation.'^’ Her Life passed with an almost mechanical 
regularity. She left the house every morning before seven 
— sometimes even before six. She had been observed to 

f o out as early as five. She came home again at any hour 
etween nine and eleven, breakfasted alone in her own 
sitting-room, did her housework, her little bit of marketing, 
and then slept or rested for an hour or two. Then, latish in 
the afternoon, she went out again, to return after dark. 

This was her manner of life, as seen by her sister and her 
sister’s husband. They puzzled themselves exceedingly as 
to the nature of that employment which ofDliged her to keep 
such curious hours. They talked, and wondered, and specu- 
lated ; but they did not venture to question her. She had 
entreated Rose to forbear ; and Rose, who so fondly loved 
her, was content to remain in ignorance, seeing that the 
mourner seemed more tranquil, more , resigned, than before 
she began this miknown labor. 

Yet they could not refrain from speculations and wonder- 
ings between themselves, the husband and wife, for whom 
life was free from all care save t^is one anxiety about the 
widowed girl. : ‘r 

Was her occupation that of a governess ? Had she found 
two sets of pupils in some humble circle, where superior 
accomplishments were not demanded in a teacher ? Did she 
go to one family in the morning, to another in the evening ? 
This seemed a natural and likely explanation. But if it Avere 
so, why had she, made a mystery of so simple a matter ? 

They could only wait and watch. They were too high- 
minded to follow or to play the spy upon her. But they 
watched her face, her bearing, when’ she was with them— 
which was but rarely now— and they waited for the revelation 
of her secret. 

^ She would not make her home with them. That was 
^ose Durand’s worst grief. If she could have had that 
beloved mourner beside her hearth every day if she could 
have seen her bending over the little one’s cradle, beguiled 
by the sweetness of his dawning intelligence ; if she had but 
been allowed to soothe and console her sister. Rose would 
have been quite happy. She would have trusted to her oWn 
loving arts, and to the great healer. Time, and she would 
have looked forward to a day when Kathleen’s wounds would 
be healed. 

But Kathleen nugged her loneliness as if it were the one 
precious thing left to her. ^ She would not be tempted from 
her solitude m the two quiet rooms upstairs. “ I am tired 
when I come home from my work,” she said one day, when 
Rose upbraided her with unkindqpss in refusing to spend 


UNDER THE RED FLAG. 




her leisure hours in the Durand menage. “ It Avould be no 
rest to me to be with you and baby, dear as he is. I want to 
be quite alone with my dreams of the past.” 

They are not good for you, Kathleen, those dreams of 
the past.” 

‘‘Oh, yes, they are. They are my greatest comfort. 
Sometimes, sitting here in the afternoon sunlight, with a 
volume of Hugo or Musset in iny lap, I almost believe that 
Gaston is sitting in that chair where you are now, by my 
side. I dare not lift my eves to look up at him.” 

“ Why not ? ” 

“lleeause T should know then that he was not there, and 
the spell would be broken. You don’t know how real day- 
dreams are to me.” 


“Too real, Kathleen ; such dreams as these lead to mad- 
ness.” 

“Let me be mad, then. I would rather be mad and see 
him there, than sane' and not see him. I would welcome 
madness to-morrow if 1 could believe that he was still alive 
—if there need be no lucid interval in which I should remem- 
ber that he was dead.” 

“ Kathleen, you frighten me to death ! ” 

“ Forgive me, deares tj^- th e girl answered gently. “There 
is no cause to fear. Yo^Jp not know how steady my brain 
has been, how regularly my heart has beaten, ever since I 
have had— employment — business to do— a purpose in life. 
Before, I felt as if 1 were wandering in a desert, under a mid- 
night sky. Comets were blazing in that sky — shooting-stars 
darting their light, now this way, now that ; but there was 
no star to guide my steps— there was no road across the 
waste. Kow I feel as if Twere travelling on a straight level 
road, with my guiding-star shining steadily before me ; there 
is such a difference.” 

“You look so white this afternoon, darling. Have you 
worked harder than usual to-day? ” 

“Yes, it was harder to-day— very, very far!” Kathleen 
answered, with an absent air. 

“You had farther to go to your employment?” faltered 
Rose, looking at her wonderingly. “ Is it not always at the 
same place ? ’’ 

“ Not always.” 

“ That is very strange.” 

“ Life is strange,” answered Kathleen, “ almost as strange 
as death. Oh, Rose, my best of sisters, don’t look so troubled 
about me. Believe me that all is going well with me. I am 
doing no harm. I am doing my duty. And all will come 
right in the end.” 

This was spoken with a fervor which in some measure 
reassured Madame Durand, She had never suspected evil 
of her sister, She knew that pure nature too well for doubt 


io6 


UNDER THE RED FLAG, 


tc be possible upon this score. Her chief fear, her ever- 
present dread, was for the soundness of the girl’s reason, for 
the capacity of her mind to stand agamstthe strain of a great 
sorrow. 

Kathleen would not go to her sister’s rooms, but Rose 
went to the widow’s lonely home two or three times in every 
day; she would not be put off by Kathleen’s desire for 
solitude. She went to her the last thing every night, and 
kneltr and prayed with her ; but Kathleen’s lips were dumb 
— that spirit v/hich had once been fervent in prayer was now 
voiceless. The widow knelt beside her sister, with bowed 
head, but there were some of Rose’s prayers to which she 
would not even say Amen. 

“Why do you not join in the Paternoster, Kathleen?” 
Rose asked, tenderly. 

“Because I cannot join with all my heart. Forgive us 
our debts as we forgive our debtors. It I said that with my 
lips my heart would be the heart of a liar. There are some 
debts that cannot be forgiven, some wrongs that must be 
avenged.” 

“Vengeance belongs to God,” answered Rose, quietly. 
“ And with him it is not vengeance, but justice.” 

“ That is all I want,” said Kathleen. “ Justice, justice, 
justice ! ” « 

And then she lifted up her f^e, which had been bowed 
upon her clasped hands until now, and prayed aloud,— 

“ O God, thou art my help and deliverer ! O Lord, make 
no tarrying! The wicked walk on every side when the vilest 
men are exalted. As the fire burneth the wood, and as the 
flame setteth the mountains on fire, so persecute them with 
thy tempest, and make them afraid with thy storm.” 


CHAPTER XII. 

FOUND. ‘ 

The days and weeks wore slowly on; July came and 
passed, and it was mid-August. Paris was at its hottest. It 
might have been a city in the tropics. Thick white mists 
rose from the boulevards and clouded the evening air. The 
stones in the courtyards of hotels and great houses were 
baked in the sunshine. The very sound of water splashing 
upon the hot streets was rapture. The atmosphere was 
heavy with heat; and it seemed as if the low thimder- 
charged sky were a cast-iron dome which roofed in the city 
and suburbs. 


UNDER THE RED FLAG, 


107 


That city, once called beautiful, still wore the aspect of 
devastation. The ruined houses still ^^ave forth an odor of 
smoke and burning. The fierce meridian sun drew out the 
stench of charred wood. On every side were the signs and 
tokens of destruction. On every side one heard of loss, and 
sorrow, and death. 

The herd of tourists went tramping through the city, 
staring, gaping, expatiating on the spectacle— disappointed 
somewhat that things were no worse. They had expected 
to find Babylon a heap ; and here were her palaces and 
churches still standing, her spires and pimiacles still point- 
ing heavenward, her (tomes glittering against the hot blue 
sky. The tourists were disillusionized, and felt they were 
getting very little for their money. 

The mightier of the ruins remained as anarchy had left 
them ; but here and there the work of reparation had begun. 
Trade was reviving. The markets had resumed their nor- 
mal aspect, and food was to be had at the old prices. The 
theatres were beginning to reopen their doors. liestaurants 
and cafes had smartened themselves up to accommodate a 
floating population of travellers, taking this desolated Baby- 
lon on their way to fairer scenes. Again the clinking of tea- 
spoons and the clash of glasses were heard on the boule- 
vard. Thepetits creves^ the cocodettes^ had emerged from 
retirement, or had come back from exile. Paris was Paris 
again; but a sorely impoverished; somewhat humiliated 
Paris. 

Kathleen’s life pursued its beaten round all this time. 
The oppressive heat of those August days did not deter her 
from her labor. Every morning, before the shops were 
opened, she was in the streets, neatly clad in her black gown 
and close black bonnet, a little market-basket on her arm, as 
of one who went upon a housewife’s errand. In the dim 
early morning she walked to her destination— one of those 
two hundred and thirty-two workshops which she had 
written down in her list. Some of these were in the re- 
motest corners of Paris, and many of her morning walks 
were long and weary ; but she was careful to allow herself 
ample time for these long distances. She always studied 
her map over-night, and learned the names of the streets by 
which she had to go. She was thoroughly systematic in her 
work, and she had by this time acquired a wonderful ex- 
pertness in findiiig her way, a wonderful knowledge of the 
great, wide-spreadingtown. It seemed to her as if there 
were not a corner of Paris, not a nook or an alley, which she 
had not explored. 

Sometimes her destination was some foul-smelling lane 
at Belleville, some dingy street near Montmartre. She went 
as far as Vincennes on one side, beyond Passy on the other. 
But whatever the distance, she went to her work with the 


UNDER THE RED FLAG. 


'ioS 

same quiet patience, the same tranquil aspect. Xobody ever 
remarked her as an eccentric-looking Iverson ; no one ever 
saw wildness or exaltation in her manner. IShe walked 
quietly onward, at a moderate, business-like ‘pace, her little 
basket over her arm ; her pale, earnest face shaded by the 
neat little crape veil, tied closely round the small black 
straw bonnet ; and she inspired no one’s wonder or curiosity. 
A clerk’s wife, catering for her little household; a seam- 
stress going* to her work. She might be either. 

When she reached her destination, and stood in front of 
the curriers’ workshops, her task became more difficult. She 
watched for the gomg and coming of the workmen at their 
• breakfast-hour, between nine and ten o’clock. She had to 
observe without being observed. She hovered near the door 
of the restaurant where they tcok their soiipe ait fr.omaxje. 

I dle had to loiter in the street or the lane, without appearmg 
to be a loiterer. This exacted all her powers as an actress ; 
but, as every intelligent woman is instinctively an actress, 
vhe contrived to perform this part of her task so skilfully as 
to escape, for the most part, unquestioned and unremarked. 

If there w^ere shops in the^ street all her little purchases 
for that humble menage^ which w as not much better than 
genteel starvation, were made upon the spot. This gave 
ner the opportunity of wasting time, and of making inqui- 
ries. It was so easy while buying a pear or a handful of 
plums at the little fruit shop, or a roll at the baker’s, to ask 
a few questions, in mere idle curiosity as it seemea, about 
the currier’s on the other side of the w^ay. Was it a small or a 
large trade, for instance ? How many w^orkmen w'ere- em- 
ployed— and what kind of men ? Then, if the shopkeeper 
Was inclined to gossip, and was friend! v, she could w^atcli 
the men go to their w^ork from the threshold of his shop, and 
hear his remarks upon them, and be sure that she saw the 
full complement employed there. 

Now and again it happened that a w^orkman was ill, or 
drunk, or idle, and did not go to his work ; and then, after 
ascertaining this fact, she had to come back to the same spot 
again, once, twice, thrice, even, to make sure of that one er- 
rant workman. For the man she wanted w^as one man among 
all the curriers of Paris, and to let one escape her might be 
to lose him. ' 

She hunted her prey with the tenacity of a red Indian. 

The work was very slow work. August was nearly over, 
and she had not completed the third part of her list. The 
currier’s shops Avere scattered. It Avas rarely that she could 
do more than tAvo in a day— one in the morning, when the 
men Avent to their work ; one in the evening, AVhen they left 
Avork. She was getting to be curiously familiar with the 
curriers of Paris, their ways and their manners ; the restau- 
rants Avhere they dined or supped late in the evening, at 


UNDER THE RED FLAG. 


T09 


long, narrow tables in low, clingy rooms, by the light of tal- 
low-candles, and amid overpowering odors of cognac and 
cheese soup : the wine-shops where they swilled gallons of 
“little .blue,” or stupefied themselves with cheap cognac. 

She learned a great deal ; but in all this time there had 
been no. sign of Serizier, no clue to the whereabouts of that 
one workman. 

Now and then she ventured to accost one of these blue 
blouses, who answered civilly or brutally, as Fate willed. 
But, for the most part, they were civil, in their rough way. 
She told her little pathetic story of a brother, a currier by 
trade, of whom she had lost all trace since the Commune. 
His chief friend was a man — also a currier — called Serizier, 
and she thought it likely that, wherever Serizier were work- 
ing, her brother would be working too. 

Did monsieur happen by chance to know anything about 
a currier called Serizier? No, nobody knew of such a man. 
Some to whom she spoke remembered the name and the man 
in. the day of his splendor— with a cocked hat, and a red scarf 
round his waist. There had been a passion for red scarfs 
among the Communards. Perhaps it was the color that 
charmed them, the hue of that blood which was to them as 
an atmosphere. 

Those who knew all about Serizier’s past career could 
give her no enlightenment about his present whereabouts^ 
and she always made her inquiries judiciously, indirectly, 
putting forward that mythical brother as the motive of her 
questionings. She did not want to be known as a woman 
who had inquired for Serizier, lest the hunted should get 
wind of the hunter. And so she came to September, and in 
all the blue blouses, the heavy figures, and stooping shoulders, 
the toil-stained hands, the- close-cropned, bullet-heads, she 
had seen no signs of Serizier. How should she know him 
when she saw him? 

Easily enough. First, she had his photograph, which she 
had discovered, after a diligent search, in a shop on the 
Boulevard St. Michel, among other heroes of the Commune. 
Secondly, she had seen him once in the flesh, and his face 
had impressed itself upon her memory in a flash, as if it had 
been photographed upon her brain. Tt was not a common 
face ; it was original in its sinister ugliness, and she could 
recall every line in that bulldog visage. 

She had seen him soon after the skirmish at Issy, when 
his laurels were yet green, and the street-arabs cheered him 
as he passed at the head of his regiment, in gaudy uniform, 
red scarf, waving plumes, clanking sword, on a horse which 
he could not ride, boastful, triumphant. It was in the spring 
evening, the clear, cool light of declining day, when she 
stood on the quay, hanging on her husband’s arm, and watch- 
ing the soldiers go by. 


I 10 


UNDER THE RED FLAG. 


Gaston toid her about Serizier. A brute, hut a brave 
hrute^ he said, and good at training his soldiers— a man who 
was likely to come well to the fore, if the Commune could 
hold its own. 

And so, with the evening sunlight on his face, Serizier 
rode slowly by, she watching him, open-eyed with wonder 
that such a brute face as this should belong to one of the 
heroes of the people. 

The face was as vividly before her eyes to-day as it had 
been that April evening. She looked at the photograph 
every night before she went to her rest. Let him disguise 
himself as he might, let him dye his skin like a Blackamoor’s, 
or hide cheeks and mouth and chin behind a forest of beard 
and whisker, he could never hide himself from her. His face 
was never absent from her mind. 

So she went on with her work doggedly, hopefully, albeit 
there were times of fear— times when she recalled how little 
foundation there was for any certainty that Serizier was in 
Paris, or even that he lived. The man for whose going in 
or Coming out she watched morning and evening, might be 
far away in the New World, rioting and revelling upon the 
spoils of revolution, conveyed to him yonder by some faith- 
ful friend ; or his corpse might have been huddled into one 
of those common graves which had yawned to receive heca- 
tombs of nameless dead. 

• The Durands had both been curious as to the fate of 
Suzon Michel. It was known in the Rue Git le Coeur that 
she had been active amid the atrocities of the Commune, a 
shining light in that fiery atmosphere. She was known to 
have carried the chassepot and the petroleum-can, to have 
been busy amid scenes of riot and death. There were some 
who declared that she was the petloleuse who had ridden, 
dressed as a vivandiere, at the head of that hideous pro- 
cession to the Rue Haxo, when the priests and the gendarmes 
were led to the slaughter, less happy in their doom than the 
archbishop and his companions, who were massacred within 
the walls of La Roquette. Certain it is that she had been 
seen more than once in a vivandiere’s costume, and that she 
was known to be one of the fiercest of that hellish crew. 

Some said that she had been shot down on the last of the 
barricades, yonder at Bellevue ; others declared that they 
had seen her in a gang of prisoners bound for Satory. No 
one regretted her ; but there was a morbid curiosity in the 
Rue Git le Coeur, and two or three adjoining streets, as to 
her fate. Details of her last hours, seasoned with plenty of 
blood, would have been welcome. 

The cremerie had been closed from the first day of the 
barricades, and had never reopened. A board in front of the 
shop announced that it was alouer presentement. Either la 
Michel was verily gone to give an account of her sins in the 


UNDER THE RED FLAG, 


I’ keeping out of the way, lest she 

misdeeds before an 
^ of her in the Rue 

i:Tit ie Coeur. Kathleen knew the popular mind upon this 
subject, and she heard Durand and Rose discuss tEe ques- 

■^ken she consented to 
^^*^® siiBPer-table. It was almost a 
lestival tor Ro^ when she could induce her sister to spend 
the evening with her. 

hated that woman,” said Rose, speaking of 
Michel ; a bold, bad woman, capable of any crime.” 

A creature of strong passions, no doubt,” answered 
Durand, terribly capable of evil. But I do not know that 
she was quite incapable of good. These women who feel so 
strongly are as fitful as a summer thunderstorm ; they will 
adore a man one day and murder him the .next. But they 
nave the power to love as well as to hate ; they have strength 
tor self-sacrifice as well as for crime. 

. “ I do not value their love any higher than their hate,” 
said Rose, who had never forgotten her early impressions 
about Suzon, never ceased to be jealous and suspicious of the 
woman who had dared to love Kathleen’s lover; “their 
hearts and minds are all evil, their love is a snare. If she 
is. dead, well— God give me charity! — let her rest in her 
grave ; if she is living, God grant that she and I may never 
meet.” 


It was only a few days after the evening upon which this 
conversation occurred that Kathleen had startling evidence 
of Suzon Michel’s existence in Paris, at the very time when 
people believed her to be either dead or in exile. 

Those first days of September in ’71 were as sultry and 
thunderous as the last days of August. Indeed, it seeined as 
if the summer grew hotter as it waned. The sun shone with 
tropical splendor all day, and at eventide the atmosphere was 
thick with heat. 

It was between eight and nine, after her evening watch 
in a street near the Barriere d’Enfer was over, that Kathleen 
went to a spot which she had visited in many a twilight hour, 
.since she first gazed upon it in the dim, early morning on 
the 25th of May. 

This was the narrow side street in which she had seen 
the bloody traces of her husband’s death, at the foot of the 
lamjD-post. That dreadful spot was to her as his grave, and 
her coming hither had all the solemnity of a pilgrimage to a 

f rave. The street was dull and solitary— a street of shabby 
ouses, shabbily occupied by the working classes. It was a 
new street which had never attained prosperity, and three or 
four of the houses were empty, staring at the sky with cur- 
tainless windows, and boards announcing that they were to 
be let. Here and there appeared a shop, but a shop which 


II2 


UNDER THER RED FLAG. 


looked as if customers were the exception rather than the 
rule. 

. On this September evening the street was empty, save for , 
a couple of women standing talking at a street door, a little 
way from the lamp-post by which Gaston fell. The house 
facing this fatal spot was empty— had been empty ever since 
Kathleen had known the street. The windows were clouded 
with dust ; the board announcing its vacancy had fallen on 
one side, and hung disconsolate. The proprietor had, doubt- 
less, abandoned all hope of finding a tenant until the evil 
days had passed, and a new birth of prosperity had come 
about for this fair land of France. It was a dreary-looking 
house, in a dreary street ; a new house, which had grown 
old and shabby without ever having been occupied. 

Kathleen walked slowly up and down the street two or 
three times, coming back to the fatal spot, and standing be- 
side it for a few minutes with bent head and clasped hands, 
and lips moving dumbly in prayer for the beloved dead. On 
the last time she saw a woman coming towards the same 
spot — coming as if to meet her— a woman who looked to her 
like a ghost. Yes, like one dead, who had come back to life 
purified and chastened by the pilgrimage through the valley 
of the shadow of death. 

It was Suzon Michel, but not the Suzon of old. The fu*e 
in the large black eyes was quenched, the face had lost its 
brazen boldness, the rich carnation of sensual vigorous beau- 
ty had faded from the cheek. A ]3ale, grave face, with seri- 
ous, mournful eyes, looked at Kathleen, and recognizing her 
instantly, blanched to the ashy whiteness of a corpse. 

The women looked at each other in silence, and then each 
passed slowly upon her way. They met and parted without 
a Avoi d. 

Tavo minutes af terAvards, before she reached the corner of 
the street, Kathleen turned suddenly, and looked back, want- 
ing to speak to Suzon IMichel, to question her, she hardly 
kneAV Avherefore or to what end. She thought of Suzon with 
horror and detestation; and yet they tAvo had loved the same 
man. Suzon might know more of the details of Gaston’s 
death than she, his wife, had been able to discover. She 
might know into AA^hat common grave his corpse had been 
flung, beneath Avhat clay his bones Avere moulclering. 

She turned, and the street Avas empty. There Avas not a . 
sign of Suzon in the distance. Had she run ever so fast she 
could not have reached the end of the street. It Avas clear, 
then, that she had gone into one of the houses. 

But AA^hich house? Kathleen loitered in the street for 
some time, contemplating those dreary-looking houses, try- 
ing to divine which of them had SAvallowed up Suzon Michel. 
Presently a woman came and stood at her door on the oppo- 
site side‘ of the street. Kathleen went over to her, and 


'UNDER THE RED FLAG. 


Questioned her, describing Madame Michel, and asking if she 
knew of such a person. 

The woman was only a lodger on the fourth story, and 
had not long lived there. She worked in a mattrass manu- 
factory a little way off, was out all day, and knew nothing of 
her neighbors. 

There was no one else in the way to answer an inquiry. 
And, after all, what good could come of any meeting between 
Kathleen and Suzon ? 

“ She hates me, and I do not love her,” thought Kathleen. 
“ But she is strangely altered. I thought Rose was right 
when she called her a creature altogether evil, a soul given 
over to wickedness. Yet to-night her face had a softer look ; 
the miholy fire seemed to have gone out of it, as if the face 
and the soul had been alike bleached and chastened by 
suffering.” 

The days and weeks wore on, and the mornings and 
evenings grew brisk and cold. That curtain of sultry heat 
\Yas lifted; the dome of white-hot iron was taken otf the 
eity, which no longer seemed like a caldron seething and 
bubbling over subterranean fires. The white vapors of sum 
mer floated away from the streets and quays, from river, 
and woods, and gardens. It was October, and the leaves 
were falling from the poor remnants of trees in the mutilated 
Bois, that lovely wood which had been hewn down and con- 
verted into an abattis. Autumn had come, and Kathleen’s 
work was still uncompleted, still went on; the worker 
patient, secret, dogged, never for one moment abandoning 
her purpose, never losing faith. Kot till she had seen every 
journeyman currier in Paris would she falter or waver in 
her work. Then it would be time to say, “ I have deceived 
myself ; Serizier has left Paris ; ” and then it would be time 
to think of following and hunting him down in the place of 
his exile, be it far or near, in the Old World or the New. 
Sea or land should be as nothing to her in that search— dis- 
tance and time as nothing. She felt as if she were the spirit 
of vengeance, a disembodied soul, free from those fetters 
which make humanity feeble. 

Day after day she went to her task— monotonous, dreary, 
full of weariness for mind and body ; and yet she knew not 
weariness. That iron purpose within her buoyed her up 
and sustained her. The spirit conquered the flesh. 

There were days when she felt ill, very ill— sick to death 
almost ; but she flung her illness aside, as if it had been a 
garment that embarrassed hei* movements, and went out to 
her work. Her white face in those days evoked the pity of 
strangers. 

“ A poor creature that ought to be in the hospital rather 
than in the streets,” thought the passers-by. “ Not long for 


114 


tJNDEli THE RED FLAG. 


this world,” said one. “ There is death in that face,” said 
another. 

Other days there were when all her limbs seemed one 
great aching pain • yet she crawled down the steep old stair- 
case and into the dim morning streets ; and, like an old horse 
which begins his day stiffly and^ feebly, and shuffles himself 
into a trot under the goad of the whip, she gathered up her 
strength for the journey, and, quickened her pace as she 
neared her goal. 

Not one day did she miss in all those toilsome weeks. 
Happily there were the Sundays, blessed intervals of respite 
and rest, which gave her new strength for the coming six 
days. 

On these quiet Sabbaths she rested all day long, lying on 
her bed like a log, hardly moving hand or foot, reading a 
little now and then, but, for the most part, resting— only 
resting— in a state of apathy which was little more than 
semi-consciousness. 

Again and again the Durands urged her to go out with 
them on the Sunday, to get fresh air, change, a little inno- 
cent gayety, a few hours of forgetfulness in some pretty 
rustic spot. They offered to take her to Asnieres, to Bou- 
gival, to Marly le Roi. 

In vain. 

“ I have a good deal of walldng every day,” she said. “ I 
like to rest — only to rest— on Sunday s.’^ 

She did not tell them that the agony of weariness was 
sometimes so acute towards the close of the week that no- 
thing but this long day of total inertia could have enabled 
her to resume the round of toil. » 

“ But you never go to mass now, Kathleen,” said Rose, 
with gentle reproachfulness. “ You used to go regularly to 
the dear old church yoirder,” with a little motion of her head 
towards Notre Damk 

“Used— yes. But he was alive then, and T went to jiray 
for him. Now— no, I could not kneel and pray in a church. 
Not yet, not yet. There is a cloud of blood that swims be- 
fore my eyes when I try to look up to heaven.” 

October was passing. It was the middle of the month— 
the 16 th— and still no sign of Serizier. Her day’s work was 
over, and Kathleen was walking slowly, with downcast eyes 
and drooping head, along the Rue de Galande, in the dusk 
of evening. She had been watching for more than an hour 
in front of an obscure workshop at the end of the street. 
There was a Belgian name over the door. She had seen two 
men leave the house, one a workman, the other a man of 
. somewhat superior appearance, who looked like the master. 
The workshop was small, poor-looking; and, according to 
her knowledge of the trade, these two men would be, in all 
likelihood, the complete staff. But she made up her mind to 


ONDER THE RED EL AG. 


go back next morniiig to watch the men going to their work, 
and to make inquiries as to the number employed. She 
never struck a Avorkshop off her list until she had made her- 
self mistress of her facts. 

Suddenly, in the autumnal dusk, she looked up, startled 
by the rattling of an empty truck over the rough stones of 
the roadway. She looked up, and found herself face to face 
with a man in a ragged blouse, wheeling a truck. 

The man was Serizier. 

She had not one moment of doubt ; not a passing shadow 
of hesitation clouded the clearness of her mind. This was 
Serizier. 

She had seen him last in the pomp of his ‘warlike ac- 
coutrements, plumed hat, clanking sword, and sabretasch, 
red scarf, breast bedizened with gold embroidery, chin and 
lip shrouded by a heavy military mustache, erect, audacious, 
- arrogant, lording it over an admiring crowd. 

To-day the man was clean-shaved; he seemed to have 
grown smaller, as if bent double Avith a load of ignominy ; 
shrunk into his sordid innerself, lessened morally and phys- 
ically by the loss of plumes and gold lace, and the insolence 
of successful audacity. 

But Kathleen Avas not the less sure of his identity. Those 
restless, shifty eyes, more unquiet than ever noAV that the 
man had fallen to the level of hunted criminals— those evil- 
looking eyes Avere not to be forgotten. It Avas he. 

Cold and trembling, Kathleen tottered, and reeled against 
the Avail. For a feAV momente her eyes Avere dim and her 
brain Avas clouded ; the passionate beating of her heart was 
almost unbearable; then, collecting her senses Avith a supreme 
effort, she turned and folloAved her prey, keeping at a re- 
spectful distance, and in the shadoAV of the houses. She saAV 
him Avheel his truck into a little yard belonging to the cur- 
rier’s Avorkshop — A\^atched him come out again and go into a 
wine-shop on the other side of the street, Avhere he sat drink- 
ing and talking Avith another blue blouse. Kathleen stood 
outside in the dusk— as she had stood outside many such- a 
windoAV in the course of her evening Avatches— and studied 
the man’s face by the light of the flaring candle Avhich stood 
in front of him, as he hobnobbed Avith his friend.. 

Yes, her patience, was reAA^arded. She had found him — 
the assassin of the defenceless. The man to Avhom tears and 
blood had been as strong Avine, for Avhom poAver had meant 
the poAver to slay and to burn. This bulldog-visaged Avork- 
man, crooning over his pipe, talking Avith bent broAV and 
angry eyes, this Avas the murderer of the Dominicans and of 
Gaston Mortemar. 

She Avent straight to the office of the Commissary of Police 
of the Quartier de la Gare ; but by this time it Avas ten 
o’clock, and too late for her to be admitted to an intervieAV 


n6 UNDER THE RED FLAG. 

with any of of the officials. She was told to return inti 
morning', when she could see the chief officer. She was there 
again wffien the office opened, saw Monsieur Grillieres, and 
told him her story. 

The intelligence was welcome, for Monsieur Grillieres, 
misled by erroneous informatioiij had already made more 
than thirty useless investigations in search of Serizier. Mon- 
sieur Grillieres started instantly, accompanied by two inspec- 
tors, but on arriving at the Hue Galande he was told that the 
Belgian currier had left the night before. He and his work- 
nren had removed the stock-in-trade — some of the things had 
gone away in a van, some in a truck. The last truck-load had 
been wheeled away at midnight. 

Where had he gone ? 

Nobody knew exactly ; everybody had some suggestion to 
offer, the ultimate result of which statements and counter- 
statements, assertions and contradictions, was that the Bel- 
gian currier had been heard to *say that he was going to es- 
ffiblish himself in the neighborhoods of the markets. 

Thither Monsieur Grillieres started in hot haste, and 
searched every shop occupied by a currier, leather-seller, or 
morocco manufacturer, but to no purpose. He found no one 
resembling Serizier among the hard-handed sons of labor 
smelling of leather. He began to despair, when, towards five 
o’clock in the afternoon, crossing a street which abutted on 
the corn-market, he saw a van standing near a door— a van 
full of bundles of leather, dressed skins, and currier’s imple- 
ments. A man was unloading ihe van, and carrying the con- 
tents into the house near which the vehicle waited. Gril- 
lieries went into the shop, where he saw a man who looked 
like the proprietor. 

“ You are a currier ?” said the magistrate. 

“Yes, monsieur.” 

“ I am a police magistrate, and I must beg you to answer 
my questions.” 

“Willingly, monsieur.” 

“ How long have you lived in this part of the town?” 

Since last night.” 

“ Where were you before ? ” 

“ Rue Galande.’’ 

“ How many workmen do you employ ? ” 

“ Two ; the man who is unloading the van, and who has 
been with me fourteen years ; the other who has been work- 
ing for me only a fortnight, and who is now in my workshop, 
on the third floor of this house.” 

“ What is his name ? ” 

“Chaligny.”^ 

“His name is not Chaligny,” answered Monsieur Gril- 
lieres. “ He is Serizier, and I am here to arrest him.” 

Grillieres went upstairs, followed by his two men. On 


UNDER THE RED FLAG. 


I17 

the third floor there was a door half open, and in the room 
within they saw a man sharpening his knives. The man 
looked up, and, seeing a stranger, was seized with an instant 
suspicion, and stretched out his hand to snatch upashaving- 
knife, the first instrument of defence or attack which offered 
itself. But Monsieur Grillieres threw himself upon him. 
“ You are my prisoner,” he said. 

“ Why do you arrest me ? ” cried the man. “ My name is 
Chaligny.” 

Duprat, one of the police offices, had been immured as a 
hostage at the prison of La Sante during Serizier’s reign of 
terror. He recognized the ci-devant colonel at a glance. 

“You are Serizier,” he said ; “ I remember you perfectly.” 

“Yes,” answered the other, doggedly, “I am Serizier. 
The game is up, and I know what I have to expect. But if I 
had seen you fellows on the staircase just now, you should not 
have taken me alive.” 

He made no resistance, and was taken to the police office, 
where he himself dictated his deposition. Thence he Avas 
transferred to the Prefecture. Thence again, after the usual 
formalities, he was sent to the Depot. 

“ My affairs are settled,” he said to his custodians. “ I 
have done enough to get my head washed in a leaden bath ; 
but it’s all the same to me. I regret nothing ; 1 only did my 
duty.” 

Colonel Serizier was right in his prophecy. His doom 
was to be the leaden bath ; but the law’s delays are tedious, 
and the murderer arrested in October was not to be de- 
spatched until the following Febru'ary. 


CHAPTER XHI. 

CONCLUSION. 

Kathleen’s mission was accomplished. There was no 
more for her to do. She went back to the Rue Git le Coeur, 
broken in spirit and in body. She lay on her bed, and it 
seemed to her that her life now Avas one long Sunday, a time 
of apathy and dumb, dull rest— joyless, hopeless. There 
Avas nothing more for her to do in this life. She had given 
the victim over to his executioners. She was told that the 
end was certain. There could be no pardon, no commuta- 
tion, of the laAv’s last penalty for such a wretch as Serizier. 
France would rise up Avith one loud cry of vengeance were 
there any puling for mercy here. . 

The slow days, wore on — dull gray days ; storms of wind, 
driving showers, anon the fogs of November floating up 
from the neighboring river— and still Kathleen lay on the 


UNDEM THE RED FLAG, 


1 18 

bed or the sofa, heli)less, prostrate, as some pale flower that 
has been torn from its stem and flung aside to wither. Rose 
had brought a doctor to see her ; but he did not even pro- 
fess the ability to cure. 

“There is nothing organically wrong,” he said. “Your 
sister must have had a very flne constitution to survive what 
she has gone through. It is a case of extreme weakness, 
loss of appetite, sleeplessness— things^ tell without actual 
disease. If you could get her away into the country, fresh 
air and change of scene might do something ; bnt she is too 
weak to be moved.” 

“ We will take her away directly she is strong enough to 
go,” said Rose. 

The doctor thought that time would never come ; but he 
held his peac^took his fee, and departed. 

Rose and Rhilip watched the fading life in that quiet 
room on the upper story as devotedly as if the thread of 
their own lives had been intertwined with it. But their 
tenderness, their little plots and expedients, were all useless. 
They could not lure Kathleen from her solitude, or beguile 
her into forgetfulness of her grief. 

“ While I was watching for that man I forgot everything, 
except the task in hand,” she said ; “ I lived and breathed 
only for that. Mv brain was burned up with one fiery 
thought ; and in those days I hardly grieved for Gaston— I 
hardly knew how much I had los^t ; but now I think of him 
and brood upon him all day long.” 

“ But if this goes on you will-go mad, or die,” said Philip, 
standing beside her sofa,- looking down at her with honest, 
earnest eyes, full of affection - “ and that will break Rose’s 
heart. Remember how she has reared ..you and cared for 
you ! To her you are more than a common sister. She has 
been to you as a mother ; and you owe her filial duty.” 

“Let her ask me anything, except to live,” answered 
Kathleen. “ I cannot live without him. Oh, she must let 
me go— in charity she Avill let me go— where I shall be at 
rest forever, as he is. She has you and the little one. She 
can spare this broken life.” 

“ But she cannot spare you, nor I, nor the little one ; and 
it is your duty to live for our sakes. Your natural grief we 
would respect, Kathleen ; but this inordinate grief, this 
olistinate despair ” 

“ Had he died a natural death, I would mourn for him as 
other widows mourn foi‘ their husbands ; I would bow to the 
will of God. But he was murdered.” 

“ And you have brought his murderer to justice. Is not 
that enough Kathleen ? 

“ I wonder whether I shall live to hear his sentence, to 
know that he has suffered a murderer’s doom ? ” she mur- 


UNDER THE RED FLAG. 


I19 


mured ; and then she turned her face to the wall, and would 
talk no more that day. 

Rose and her husband began to despair. It seemed to 
them that Kathleen’s vital power was ebbing day by day, 
gradually imperceptibly. The loss of strength was only in- 
dicated by the facts of her daily life. Last week she had 
risen early every morning, and had swept and dusted her 
rooms with only a little help from Rose, who was ever on 
the watch to aid and comfort her. This week she could only 
crawl about a little, dusting Gaston’s books with tremulous 
hands, arranging and rearranging his desk or his book- 
shelves, with a fluttered, nervous air. A little while ago she 
had lain on her bed or her sofa all day, as if in mere pur- 
poseless apathy. Now the time had come when she lay there 
from sheer weakness, broken down, fading before their very 


eyes. 

They had gradually schooled themselves to bow to the 
rod. They began to talk to^each other about her as of one 
foredoomed, unspeakably precious, inasmuch as she was to 
be with them but a few weeks— perchance but a few days. 
They talked sorrowfully, yet with resignation, of a future 
in which she wns to have no part, save as a sweet, sad 
memory. 

“ How fond she would havo been of you, my angel,” said 
Rose — prattling mothers’ tender prattle to the baby on 
her ^ knees, “ it she could but have lived to see you grow 

^ One day, when the invalid upstairs had sunk so low that 
it seemed as if she could hardly last to the end of the week, 
Philip Durand came past the little cremerie^ which had once 
been Suzon Michel’s, on his way home. It was between four 
and five, and already dusk, and he was startled to see the 
door of the shop open and a light within. 

While he stared, wondering whether a tenant had been 
found for the deserted house, now that trade was looking 
up a little, Suzon herself emerged from the darkness within, 
followed by a man, who blew out a candle, and came into 
the street carrying a bunch of keys. The man was the land- 
lord, who had been making an inspection of the premises 
with his old tenant. 

“ Come, Madame Michel,” he said, as he locked the door 
on the outside, “ you cannot do better than take dowm the 
vsh utters to-morrow morning ; no one will do so well as you 
in that shop, and now that business is brisk ever5rwh’ere, 
you may make a better trade than ever. I shall not raise 
your rent ” 

“ Oh, but monsieur is so generous ! ” cried Suzon, iron- ' 
ically ; “ everybody knows that rents are going up in 
Paris ” 

“ W ell, I say it shall be the old rent.” 


120 


UNDER THE RED FLAG. 


“ 111 think it over,” said Suzon ; “ but it will be at least 
a week before I can decide. Certain it is that I must do 
something ; one cannot live upon one’s savings for- 
ever.” 

“ It was a suicide to shut up such a shop as that, except 
for just the week of the barricades. But you are not half the 
woman you were, Madame Michel ; the air of your present 
abode camiot agree with you.” 

He wished her good-evening and trotted away, fingering 
his bunch of keys. Two minutes afterwards she met Philip 
Durand face to face. 

Yes, she was changed. The woman of the people, the 
Amazon, the petroleuse, was curiously subdued and soft- 
ened. Some chastening influence had subjugated her ve- 
hement nature and altered the expression of her coun- 
tenance to a degree that was almost a transformation. 

“ Monsieur Durand ! ” she exclaimed, with a startled 
look ; and then she said, quietly, “ I am a stranger in this 
neighborhood now. It is like coming back to an old life. 
How is your wife ? ” 

“ She is very well.” 

“ And her sister— Madame Mortemar ? ” 

“ She is— dying.” 

“ Dyinff ! That i& a strong phrase.” 

“It is the truth. We have done all that care and love 
could do, but she is slipping away from us. I have no hope 
that she will last to the end of the month.” 

“ What is her malady ? ” 

“ A broken heart.” 

“ Ah, that is more common than doctors believe. Has she 
never got over the loss of her husband ? ” 

Suzon had turned to accompany Philip, and they were 
walking side by side towards the Rue Git le Coeur. 

“ NeveK” 

“ I suppose, though, she is glad that Serizier was taken 
the other day ? ” 

“ She was glad ; it was her own work. She only lived to 
bring the murderer to justice, and that being accomplished, 
it seemed as if the main spring of her life was broken.” 

“ She brought him to justice ! ” cried Suzon. “ What do 
you mean ? ” 

‘ Simply what I say ; Serizier ’s arrest was brought about 
solely by my sister-in-law ; she watched and waited for him, 
day by day, for three months. It was she, and she only, 
who brought him to his doom.” 

“ I read in the papers that it was a woman, but I thought 
it was a jealous woman— some discarded mistress, perhaps. 
And you say that it was she— that lily-faced girl— .sAe who 
tracked the murderer to his hole ? ” 

“ She and no other.” 


UNDER THE RED FLAG. 


I2I 


And she is dying ? ” 

“Yes, she is dying. The task weakened the sources of 
life; boc^ and mind were alike exhausted by the long, 
patient enort— unshared, unknown, by those who loved her 
—and now a broken heart has done the rest.” 

“ She shall not die ! ” cried Suzon, with a voice so loud 
that it startled the passers-by, who turned and stared at her ; 

“ no,” she went on, hurriedly, hreathlesslyj “ if there is a 
God in heaven she shall not die. If there is no God, well, 
then this earth is a shambles, and the innocent have no 
friend. She shall not die ! ” 

“ What can you do to save her ? ” 

“ Give her something to live for ; give her so strong a 
reason why she should live that the tide of life will flow back 
to her veins, the weary heart will beat strong with hope and 
love.” 

“You are mad! ” 

“ No I am not mad. Go and get a fly. Can she be moved, 
do vou think ? Could she bear to be driven a little way ? ” 
God knows. She is as weak as an infant.” 

“ Oh, only go and get the carriage. We will manage it, 
we will carry her. Go ; I have but to whisper in her ear, 
and she will have the strength of a lioness. Bring the car-, 
riage to the door yonder ; I will run on and see your wife.” 

Durand thought she must be mad ; but her earnestness, 
her energy, were electrical, and he obeyed her. In a case so 
hopeless any gleam of hope was welcome. There was some 
secret to be told, some revelation coming. He scarce asked 
himself what, but hurried off to engage the first prowling fly 
he could find. 

Suzon ran upstairs to the third floor. She listened at 
the door of Kathleen’s sitting-room. There was a faint mur- 
mur of voices within, and she entered without knocking. 

Kathleen was lyii^g on the sofa near the fireplace,her 
wasted cheek white as the pillow on which it rested. Rose 
sat by her, bending over her, talking to her in low murmurs. 
The room was dimly lighted by a lamp on the mantlepiece. 

Suzon went across the room and knelt by the invalid’s 
side. 

“ It is I, Suzon Michel,” she said, “ the woman who once 
hated you, biff who has since learned to pity you, and who 
now honors you. Is it true that you tracked that wild beast 
to his lair ? that when all the police in Paris had failed to 
find him, you hunted that tiger down ? ” 

“ Yes, I found Serizier. They say he will be shot.” 

“ Sagre nom., yes, he shall be shot. The women of the 
Place d’ltalie— the people who lived in fear and dread of him, 
to whom his name was a terror— they will not let him escape, 
now the law has got him. Madame Mortemar will you 


12 ^ Under the red flaC. 

come with me ? I want to take you to my home, yonder, 
close to the spot where your husband fell.” 

Kathleen started up into a sitting position. It was like 
a sudden awakening to life, as if some magic wand had been 
waved over her, magnetizing the feeble clay. 

“ What ! ” she cried, “ you live there ? 1 thought it must 
be so, that night. Yes, yes, take me to the spot where he 
fell. Let me see it once more— once before I die. To me it 
is as sacred as a grave. I cannot go to his grave,” she added, 
despairingly. 

Dear love, you are too weak to stir,” pleaded Rose, ten- 
derly, with her arms about her sister’s wasted form.” 

She is not too weak to come with me. She should come 
if she were in her grave-clothes. You can come with us— 
you can help me to carry her downstairs. Your husband 
will have a fly ready. Yes ! ” cried Suzon, running to the 
AvindoWj “it is there, at the door below. Bring a little 
brandy in a bottle- wet her lips with a little first. A warm 
shawl— so,” wrapping it round her as if she had been a child. 
“You are not afraid to come, are you, my little one ? I have 
good news for you at the end of the journey. 

Her impetuosity evolved a corresponding energy in Kath- 
leen, who was tremulous with excitement. Rose understood 
that there was new life at the end of this sudden journey. 
Yes, there was a revelation at hand, about Gaston. She 
kept herself calni and steady, while those two others were 
on Are with excitement. Between them she and Suzon Mi- 
chel carried Kathleen downstairs to the fly, the three women 
got inside, Kathleen wrapped in three shawls. Philip got 
on the box beside the driver ; in a crack or so o^ his whip 
they were rattling into the Boulevard St. Michel. 

It was a longish drive, to the Place d’ltalie ; but urged by 
Suzon, the man got over the distance very quickly. The 
dull side-street looked unspeakably dreary in the wintry 
gloom, the lamps burning dimly, the windows showing little 
light— signs of failure and poverty on every side. 

The fly stopped before that empty house which Kathleen 
had noticed in the summer gloaming. The board was still 
hanging above the door, the windows were all blank and 
dark ; but Suzon opened the door with her key, while Du- 
rand lifted Kathleen out of the vehicle. 

“ Carry her up-stairs, following me,” said Suzon ; “ but 
she and I must go into the room alone. You others must 
stay outside.” 

It is not a trap, is it?” asked Rose frightened. “You 
mean her no harm ? ” ♦ 

^ in the world, and she knows 

it, .answered Suzon, holding Kathleen’s hands, which feebly 
pressed hers in response to these words. 

They stopped at the door of the back room on the first 


UNDER THE RED FLAG, 


123 


floor, Siizon first ; then Philip, with Kathleen carried on his 
shoulder ; liose in the rear, but pressing close against them, 
lest there should be danger ahead. 

Kathleen slipped from Durand’s arms, and clung to Su 
zon jMichel, as tne latter ojjened the door. The two women 
went into the room together, and Pose and her husband 
were left outside. 


There was one instant’s silence, and then a wild shriek— 
a shriek that might he terror, grief or joy. One could not 
tell what it meant, outside the door. 

Rose was in an agony. She would have dashed into the 
room, but Philip held her back. 

^ “ Let them be for a few moments,” he said. “ Mortemar 

is alive. The mystery can be only that— alive, and shut up 
in mis house under watch and ward of that woman. 

Two minutes after, the door was opened by Suzon, and 
the Durand’s went in. The room was comfortable enough 
within, desolate as the house looked outside. The furni- 
ture was humble, but neat and decent. There was a &e 
burning in the grate, a lamp on the table. 

In an easy-chair in front of the fire sat a man with his 
leg in splints from the hip downAvards. He was pale to 
ghastliness, and had the look of one who had but begun the 
slow progress of recovery from a sickness nigh unto death. 
His hair and beard were long, his hands thin to transpa- 
rency. 

Yes, it was Gaston Mortemar, and his wife Avas kneeling 
at his ' feet, kissing the Avasted nands, murmuring sweetest 
Avords, nestling her head in his bosom, ineffably happy. 

“ I give you back your dead,” said Suzon solemnly. ' “ He 
Avas left for dead Avhen I picked him up and brought him in 
here, shot through shoulder and hip and leg Avith half a 
dozen bullets. The surgeon I brought to him said it Avas a 
hopeless case ; but for the sake of surgery, as an amateur, 
he Avould try to cure him. For two months he lay in instant 
danger. For seven weeks he Avas mad with brain fever — 
fcA^er that came from the pain of his wounds. I have nursed 
him through all. The surgeon Avill tell you if I have been a 
faithful nurse. And now I give him back to you, not healed, 
but on ther fair road to recovery; although he will be lame 
all his life, poor soul ; but that does not count in a writer, 
does it ? He Avill be all the greater with his pen if he has 
less temptation to roam.” 

“ Bless you ! May God bless and reward you for your de- 
votion ! ” cried Kathleen, 

“ Bah ! There is no question of blessing or rcAvard. I 
have been a wicked woman. I kept him like a bird in a cage, 
and I let you think him dead, and I told him you had perished 
on the last day of the barricades, and I let him mourn for 
you. He was helpless, in my power, and 1 lied to him ^ind 


UNDER THE RED FLAG. 


124 

cheated him. But I snatched him from, the iaws of death ; 
the surgeon who has attended him will tell you that. 1 
dragged him into this empty house, dragged him away just 
tTie last batch of Serizier’s bloodhounds were tunimg the 
corner of the street, whooping for more blood; and 1 kept 
liim here, closely guarded, hidden from all the world, except 
the surgeon, who believed that he was my brother. He could 
tell no tales, poor fellow, for it is only within the last three 
weeks that he has been in his right wits ” 

Gaston’s head was leaning forward against Kathleen s, 
the husband’s haggard brow against the wife’s wasted cheek. 
Both faces were the image of death, and yet radiant with a 
new-born life— the sublime light of happy love. 

“ She told me you were dead, Kathleen,” he murmured. 

“ Forgive her, dear. She saved you, and I have avenged 
you. Oh, my love ! my love ! God is good. He has given you 
back to me, out of the grave.” 

“ How did you manage to occupy this house, and to keep 
your existence here a secret ? ” asked Durand. 

“ Tiiere was no difficulty. I was not without means. I 
went to the landlord, and offered him half the rent of the 
house for the use of two or three rooms at the back. The 
liouse had been unlet a year and a half — the street is a failure 
— so he was glad to accept my offer, and the board was left 
os^er the door to avert suspicion. The people who saw me go 
in and out took me for a caretaker ; nobody asked any ques- 
tions. I had a van-load of furniture brought here after dark 
from my rooms at the crew erf e, and T made things as comfort- 
able as I could for my patient. If he had any knowledge of 
those dark days he would know that I had nnrsed him faith- 
fully. For six weeks I scarcely knew what it was to sleep 
for an hour at a stretch. I had a mattrass at the foot of his 
bed. and I lay down now and then like a dog, and slept a 
dog^s sleep, with my ear on the alert for the first groan of 
pain.” 

“ God bless you ! ” cried Kathleen, taking her hand, and 
kissing it. 

“You area strange woman,” said Durand; “but let no 
one say that vou are wholly bad.” 

“ I was a devil in those days of the barricades. I was mad, 
•like the rest of them ; maddened with the thought of all the 
wrongs that we canaille have suffered from the beginning of 
the world. Yes, from the days when Herod put John the 
Baptist in prison, and cut off his head, to keep faith with a 
princess who danced. I was drunk with blood, like the rest 
of them. But in six weeks of watchfulness and watching one 
has time to think ; and in the silence of the night, sometimes, 
T used to wonder whether it was good for a woman to be an 
esprit f(ri% whether it was not better to be cheated, even, and 
to believe in some one up yonder, who can set the riddle of 


Under the red flag. 


125 

this world ri^ht when He chooses— some hand turning the 
great wheel of destiny yonder behind the clouds. No, Mon- 
sieur Durand, I am not all evil.” 

It was not till the end of the year that Gaston was well 
enough to be removed to the Rue Git le Cceur, ^nd, in the 
meantime, he and his wife occupied the rooms in the empty 
house near the Place d’ltalie, with that good-natured busy- 
body, Madame Schubert— generally known as cV bonne Eehu- 
bert— to take care of them. Suzon Michel went straight from 
the house where those two whom she had held apart were 
lost in the bliss of an unhoped-for union, and gave herself 
up to the police. The account against her name was heavy, 
and payment in full v/as exacted. She was despatched with 
a gang of Communards on board a rotten old ship bound for 
Cayenne, and, in the unutterable miseries of that dreadful 
voyage, she was like an angel of mercy to her fellow-sinners. 
And at the convict settlement the petroleuse, the Amazon, 
became the nurse and ministering angel of the fever-stricken 
wretches in the prison hospital, a source of comfort and of 
hope to many a dying captive, till the deadly climate did its 
work, and the pestilence struck her down as it had stricken 
others — a woman young in years, but old in strange and sad 
experience ; a sinner, but not without hope of pardon. 

The dark days of November and December were blissful 
days for Kathleen. Health and strength returned to her as 
if by magic ; and in a week after her restoration to happiness 
she was able to help in waiting upon her husband. Another 
week, and she would hardly allow INladame Schubert to do 
anything for him. In the third week she was walking to 
and fro i;he printing office of Gaston’s old journal, which 
had been resuscitated under a new name, as The Friend of 
Freedom., and the proprietor of which was enraptured to 
receive copy from the brilliant pen of his old contributor, 
given up as lost to literature forever. 

Yes, those were happy days. That poor shattered leg of 
Gaston’s had shrunk and shortened, and he would go limping 
along the road of life to the end of his days ; but his mind 
was clear and vigorous as ever and his heart was content. 
During the enforced quiet of those December days he made 
a vigorous beginning upon that scheme of a novel which he 
had mentioned to Kathleen on their Avedding-dav- But he 
did not keep his Avork secret from his Avife, as he had threat- 
ened. He garnered up no surprises, being in too much need 
of her sympathy to sustain his belief in himself. 

He read the day’s portion aloud to Kathleen at night, the 
last thing, when that good old Schubert, Avho insisted upon 
coming every day Avith her market-basket, smelling of lef^ 
Halles Centrales, to cook and attend upon them— Avhen 
Maman Schubert had taken her modest little nip of eau de 
me, put her arm through the handle of her empty basket, and 


126 


UNDER THE RED RLAC. 


wished them good-night for the sixth or seventh time. Then 
Kathleen perched herself upon the arm of her husband’s 
chair, and nestled her head upon his shoulder while he read 
his manuscript. It was a love-story, full of passion and fire, 
and Kathleen felt that it must make a mad, a furious, suc- 
cess. Kor was she far out in her reckoning. When a man, 
whose pen has grown hold and brilliant in the work of a 
literary journeyman, whose memory has garnered the expe- 
rience of a youth and manhood spent in tlie Very whirlpool 
of metropolitan life, and who has read and dreamed and 
thought superabundantly in his leisure hours, and his wan- 
derings to and fro— when such a man girds up his loins, and 
says, ‘‘ Enough of the hard facts of life— now I will give 
myself full play in the garden of fancy,” the chances are that 
he will write a grand novel. 

Serizier was condemned to death on the 17th of February, 
1872, by the sixth council of war. He appealed agamst this 
sentence, setting forth the service which he had done to 
General Chanzy, on the 19th of March, ’71, in defending him 
against the revolutionary mob. It was rumored in the neigh- 
borhood of the Place d’ltalie that Serizier would not be ex- 
ecuted ; whereupon an unprecedented agitation arose among 
the people. The inhabitants of the neighborhood, remem- 
bering the agony of terror under which they had lived on 
account of this man, signed a petition demanding that no 
commutation of the extreme sentence should be accorded to 
the late chief of the 13th Legion, and entreating that, as an 
example and a just expiation, he should be executed in front 
of the prison over which he had ruled, and on the very spot 
where he had presided over the massacre of the Dominicans. 

This strange request could not be granted ; but Serizier’s 
crimes were of too black a dye to admit of mercy. He and 
his lieutenant Bobeche were shot on the plain of Sartory. 

Gaston Mortemar’s novel was published in the following 
autumn, and obtained a more brilliant success than any book 
that has appeared since Madame Bovary. There was a fire 
and a freshness in the style which made the appearance of 
the story a sensation, an event; and Gaston saw himself 
released forever from the treadmill routine of a third-rate 
newspaper, a man with place and name in the ranks of liter- 
ature, free to write what he liked, and secure of publisher 
or pui)lic. And as the years wore on— years of peace and 
prosperity— those two households of the Durands and the 
Mortemars were undarkened by so much as a passing cloud. 
Industry, honor, and domestic love ruled in each menage^ and 
there was no break in the union between the sisters ; albeit 
Durand and Bose remained constant to the town quarters in 
the Hue Git le Coeur, v/hile Gaston and his wife transferred 


UNDER THE RED ELAU 


iT'j 

tlieir household gods to a dainty little villa at Passy, where 
the husband could write in his garden among the birds and 
flojvers, while his young wife guided the footsteps of her 
yearling baby up and down the little grassplot. 

The carved oak sideboard was bought by ' Sir Richard 
Wallace, and Durand’s fame as a craftsman and artist was 
safely established from that hour : and so, where there had 
been cloud there was sunshine, where there had been storm 
there was perfect and holy calm^ 


> 


THE END. 




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ca-K,.Aj!Tni>5 SGiTJ^AJEiH ^liTiD Tnpiiic3-Hrp :piA.jsros- 
The demands now made by an educated musical public are so 
exacting, tliat very few piano-forte manufacturers can produce instru- 
ments that will stand the test which merit requires. 

SOHMER & Co., as manufacturers, rank among this chosen few, 
who are acknowledged to be makers of standard instruments. In 
these days when many manufacturers urge the low price of their 
• wares, rather than their superior quality, as an inducement to pur- 
chase, it may not be amiss to suggest that, in a piano, quality and 
price are too inseparably joined, to expect the one without the other. 

Every piano ought to be judged as to the quality of its tone, its 
touch, and its workmanship ; if any one of these is wanting in excel- 
lence, however good the others may be, the instrument will be imper- 
fect. It is the combination of all these qualities in the highest degree 
that constitutes the perfect piano, and it is such a combination, as has 
given the SOHMER its hono rable posit ion with the trade and public. 

. _ Pricesas reasonableasconsistent 

with the Highest Standard. 

MAMUFACTURERS, 

149 to 155 East 14th St., N.Y: 




THE BEST 



EVER INVENTED. 


No Lady, Married or 
Single, Rich or Poor, 
Housekeeping or Board- 
ing, will be without it 
after testing its utility. 

Sold by all first-class 
Grocers, bt^t beware of 
worthless iwitatipug, 






KEYSTONE ORGAN. Market. Price reduce< 

from $1(5 to $125. Acclimatized case. Anti-Shoddy and Anti-Monopoly, Kot all case 
stops top and advertisement. Warranted for 6 years. Has the Excelsior IS-Stoi 
Comtination, embracing : Diapason, Flute, Melodia-Forte, yiolina, Aeolina, Viola 
^' lute-Forte, Celeste, Dulcet, Echo, Melodia, Celcstina, Octave Coupler, Tremelo 

cr Air Brake, Grand-Organ Swell. Two Knee 

^ops. This is a Walnut case, with Music Balcony, Sliding Desk, Side Handles, &c 
Dimensions 8 Height, 75 inches ; Length, 48 inches ; Depth, 24 inches. This 5-Octav< 

Music, we Mdll box and deliver at dock In New York, fa 
Send by express, prepaid, check, or registered letter to 

DICKINSOIT & CO., Pianos and Organs, 


19 West lltH Street, New York. 


b «=8 






LOVELL’S' library:-catalogue. 


iii 113. More Words About the Bible, 

V by Rev. Jas. S. Bush 20 

114. Monsieur Lecoq, GaboriauPt.I..20 

^ IMonsieur Lecoq, Pt. II 20 

V 115. An Outline of Irish History, by 

Justin H. McCarthy 10 

116. TheLerouge Case, byGaboriau..20 

117. Paul Clifford, by Lord Lytton. . .20 

118. A New Lease of Life, by About. .20 

.119. Bourbon Lilies.. 20 

120. Other People's Money, Gaboriau.20 
; 121. The Lady of Lyons, Lytton... 10 

122. Ameline de Bourg 15 

123. A Sea Queen, by W. Russell — 20 

124. The Ladies Lindores, by Mrs. 

Oliphant. 20 

125. Haunted Hearts, by Simpson. ...10 
' 126. Loys, Lord Beresford, by The 

<4- Duchess . . .' 20 

127. Under Two Flags, Oiiida, Pt. I. .15 

^ Under Two Flags. Pt. II 15 

128. Money, by Lord Lytton 10 

129. In Peril of His Life, by Gaboriau.20 

130. India, by Max Miiller 20 

131. Jets and Flashes ..20 

132. Moon^ine and Marguerites, by 

^ The Duchess 10 

133. Mr Scarborough’s Family, by 

Anthony Trollope, Parti 15 

^ Mr. ScarDorough’sFamily, PtII.1.5 

134. Arden, by A. Mary F. Robinson.15 

135. The Tower of Percemont 20 

136. Yolande, by Wm. Black 20 

137. Cruel London, by Joseph Hatton. 20 
13^ The Gilded Clique, by Gaboriau.20 

139. Pike County Folks, E. H. Mott. .20 

140. Cricket on the Hearth 10 

141. Henry Esmond, by Thackeray. .20 

142. Strange Adventures of a Phae- 

ton, by Wm. Black. 20 

143. Denis Duval, by Thackeray 10 

144. Old Curiosity Shop,Dicken8,Pt 1.15 
Old Curiosity Shop, Part II. . . .15 

145. Ivanhoe, by Scott, Part 1 15 

Ivanhoe, by Scott, Part II 15 

146. White Wings, by Wm. Black. .20 

147. The Sketch Book, by Irving 20 

14S. Catherine, by W. M. Thackeray. 10 

149. Janet’s Repentance, by Eliot — 10 

150. Barnaby Budge, Dickens, Pt I. .15 

Bamaby Rudge, Part II 15 

151. Felix Holt, by George Eliot 20 

1.52. Richelieu, by Lord Lytton 10 

153. Sunrise, by Wm. Black, Part I. .15 
Sunrisi. by Wm. Black. Part 11.15 

154. Tour of the World in 80 Days.. 20 

155. Mystery of Orcival, Gaboriau.. . .20 

156. Lovel, the Widower, by W. M* 

Thackeray 10 

157. Romantic Adventures of a Milk- 

maid, by Thomas Hardy 10 

158. David Copperfield, Dickens, Pt 1.20 

David Copperfield, Fart II 20 

160. Rienzi, by Lord Lytton, Part I. .15 
Rienzi, by Lord Lytton, Part II. 15 

161. Promise of Marriage, Gaboriau.. 10 

162. Faith and Unfaith, by The . 

' Duchess ,.,..,...80 


163. 

164. 

165. 

166. 

167. 

168. 

169 . 

170. 

171. 

172. 

173 . 

174. 

175 

176 

177. 

178. 

179. 

180. 
181. 
182. 

183. 

184. 

185. 


186. 

187. 

188. 

189. 

190. 

191. 

192. 

193. 

194. 

195. 

196. 

197. 

198. 

199. 


200 . 

201 . 


202 . 

203. 

204. 

205. 

206. 

207. 

208. 


The Happy Man, by Lover... 10 
Barry Lyndon, by Thackeray. ...20 

Fyre’s Acquittal 10 

Twenty Thousand Leagues Un- 
der the Sea, by Jules Verne 20 

Anti-Slavery Days, by James 

Freeman Clarke 20 

Beauty’s Daughters, by The 

Ducbess 20 

Beyond the Sunrise 20 

Hard Times, by Charles Dicken8.20 
Tom Cringle’s Log, by M. Scott, .20 
Vanity Fair, by W.M.'Thackeray.20 
Underground Russia, Stepmak..20 
Middlemarch, by Elliot, Pt I.... 20 

Middlemarch, Part II 20 

Sir Tom, by Mrs. Oliphant 20 

Pelham, by Lord Lytton 20 

The Story of Ida 10 

Madcap Violet, by Wm. Black. .20 

The Little Pil^im 10 

Kilmeny, by Wm. Black.... 20 

Whist, or Bumblepnppy? 10 

The Beautiful Wretch, Black.... 20 
Her Mother’s Sin, by B. M. Clay.20 
Green Pastures and Piccadilly, 

by Wm. Black 20 

The Mysterious Island, by Jules 

Verne, Part I 15 

The Mysterious Island, Part II. . 15 
The Mysterious Island, Part 111.15 
Tom Brawn at Oxford, Part I. . .15 
Tom Brown at Oxfcrd, Part II. .15 
Thicker than Water, by J. Payn.20 
In Silk Attire, by Wm. Black. . .20 
Scottish Chief .Jane Porter, Pt.I.20 

Scottish Chiefs, Part II 20 

Willy Reillyjby Will Carleton. .20 
The Nautz Family, by Shelley.20 
Great Expectations, by Dickens.SO 
Pendennis.by Thackeray, Part 1.20 
Pendennis.by Thackeray, Part 11.20 

Widow Bedott Papers. . 1 20 

Daniel Deronda,Geo. EIiot,Pt. 1.20 

Daniel Deronda, Part II 20 

AltioraPeto, by Oliphant...... 20 

By the Gate of the Sea, by David 

Christie Murray 15 

Tales of a Traveller, by Irving. . .20 
Life and Voyages of Columbus, 
by Washington Irving, Part I. .20 
Life and Voyages of Columbus, 
by Washington Irving, Part 11.20 

The Pilgrim’s Progress 20 

Martin Chuzzlewit, by Charles 

Dickens, Part I .20 

Martin Chuzzlewit, Part II 20 

Theophrastus Such, Geo. Eliot. . .20 
Disarmed, M. Betham-Ed wards.. 15 
Eugene Aram, by Lord Lytton. 20 
The Spanish Gypsy and Other 

Poems, by George Eliot 20 

Cast Up by the Sea. Baker 20 

Mill on the Floss, Eliot, Pt. I... 15 

Mill on the Floss, Part II 15' 

Brother Jacob, and Mr. Gilfil’i 
Love Story, by George Eliot. . . 10 
Wrecks in the Sea of Life 20 


QECRET 

wj OF 

gEAUTY. 

How to Beautify the Complexion. 

All women knowthat it !• beautyj^rather than genin*. which all generatfon* 
of men hare worshipped In the sex. Can it be wondered at, then, that so much 
of woman's time and attention should bo directed t« the means of deTeloping 
and preserving that beautv! The most important adjunct to beauty is a clear, 
smooth, soft and beautiful skin. With this essential a lady appears handsosae, 
even if her features are not perfect. 

Ladies afflicted with Tan, Freckles, Rough or Discolored Skin, should lose 
no time in procuring and applying 

LAIRD’S BLOOM OF YOUTH. 

It will immediately obliterate all such imperfections, and is entirely harm- 
less. It has been chemically analyaed by the Board of Health of If ew York City, 
and pronounced entirely free from any material injurious to the health or skin. 

Over two million ladies have used this delightful toilet preparation, and in 
every instance it has riven entire satisfaction. Ladies, if you desire to be beauti- 
ful, give LAIRD'S BLoOM OF YOUTH a trial, and be convinced of Its won- 
derful efficacy. Sold by Fancy Gk>ods Dealers and Druggists everywhere. 

Price, 75«. per Bottle. Bepot, 8S John St., N. IT. 


FAIR FACES, 

And fair, in the literal and most pleasing sense, art 
those kept rnnsH andrunn by the use of 

BUCHAN’S CARBOLIC TOILET SOAP 

This article, which for the past fifteen years has 
had the commendation of every lady who uses it, is 
made from the best oils, combined with inst th# 
proper amonnt of glycerine and chemically purs 
carbolic acid, and is the reslEstion of a PEB- 
FKCT SOAP. 

It will positively keep the skin fresh, clear, and whitb; removing tan, 
freckles ana discolorations from the skin; nealiug all eruptions* prevent chap- 
ping or roi^hness ; allay irritation and soreness ; and overcome all onplsaaant 
effects from perspiration. 

Is pleasaatly perfumed : and tteithenr when using or aftsrwards is the slight- 
est odor of the acid perceptible. 

BUCHAN’S CABBOLIC DENTAL SOAP 

OLnans and preserves the teeth; cools and refreshes the mouth; sweetens the 
breath, and is in every way an unrivalled dental nreparatiom. 

BUCHAN’S CARBOLIC HiBBIClNAL SOAP euree all 
XrmpUoBi and Skin Diaeacca. 






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